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It’s harder to breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can turn from limpid blue to stormy black in minutes. You start to struggle right away when you arrive, as if a brutal arm were wound around your waist and squeezing. Everything is slower; during siesta the bicycles only rarely go by along the empty street, the ice cream shops seem abandoned in spite of the ceiling fans that spin for no one, and the chicharras shriek hysterically in their hiding places. I’ve never seen a chicharra. My aunt says they’re horrible creatures, spectacular flies with pulsating green wings and smooth, black eyes that seem to look right at you. I don’t like the word chicharra; I wish they were always called cicadas, which is only used when they’re in the larval stage. If they were called cicadas, their summer noise would remind me of the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees along the Paraná, or the white stone mansions with their staircases and their willows. But as it is, as chicharras, they make me remember the heat, the rotting meat, the blackouts, the drunks who stare with bloodshot eyes from their benches in the park.

That February I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Corrientes because I was tired of their reproaches: “You got married and we haven’t even met your husband, how is that possible, you’re hiding him from us.”

“No,” I laughed over the phone, “how could I be hiding him, I’d love for you to meet him, we’ll come soon.”

But they were right: I was hiding him.

My aunt and uncle were the custodians of the memory of my mother, their favorite sister, killed in a stupid accident when I was seventeen. During the first months of mourning they offered to have me come live with them in the north. I said no. They came to visit me often. They gave me money, called me every day. My cousins stayed to keep me company on weekends. But I still felt abandoned, and because of that solitude I fell in love too quickly, I got married impetuously, and now I was living with Juan Martín, who irritated and bored me.

I decided to bring him to meet my aunt and uncle to see if other eyes could transform him in mine. One meal on the wide porch of their big house was enough to dispel that hope: Juan Martín squealed when a spider brushed his leg (“If they don’t have a pink cross, don’t worry,” my uncle Carlos told him, a cigarette between his lips. “Those are the only poisonous ones.”), drank too much beer, spoke with zero modesty about how well business was going, and commented several times on the “underdevelopment” that he saw in the province.

After we ate he sat with my uncle Carlos, drinking whiskey, and I helped my aunt in the kitchen.

“Well, child, it could be worse,” she told me when I started to cry. “He could be like Walter, who raised his hand to me.”

Yes, I nodded. Juan Martín wasn’t violent; he wasn’t even jealous. But he repelled me. How many years was I going to spend like that, disgusted when I heard his voice, pained when we had sex, silent when he confided his plans to have a child and renovate the house? I wiped away my tears with hands covered in soap suds; they burned my eyes and I cried even harder. My aunt pushed my head under the faucet and let the water wash my eyes out for ten minutes. That’s how we were when Natalia came in. Natalia was my aunt’s oldest daughter and my favorite cousin. Natalia, tanned as always, wearing a very loose white dress, her hair long, dark, and disheveled. I saw her through the fog of my irritated eyes, which I couldn’t stop blinking; she was carrying a flowerpot and smoking. Everyone smokes in Corrientes. If anyone ever dared to hint that it wasn’t healthy, they’d stand looking at the heretic, confused, and then give a little laugh.

Natalia placed the flowerpot on the kitchen table, told my aunt, her mother, that she had planted the azalea, and she greeted me with a kiss on the head. My husband didn’t like Natalia. He didn’t find her physically attractive, which was practically insane on his part—I had never seen a woman as beautiful as her. But on top of that, he looked down on her because Natalia read cards, knew home remedies, and worst of all, communicated with spirits. “Your cousin is ignorant,” Juan Martín told me, and I hated him. I even thought about calling Natalia and asking her to give me a recipe for one of her potions, maybe a poison. But I let it go, like I let every petty little thing pass while a white stone grew in my stomach that left very little room for air or food.

“Tomorrow I’m going to Asunción,” Natalia told me. “I need to buy some ñandutí cloth.”

To earn money, Natalia had a small business selling crafts in the city’s main street, and she was famous for her exquisite taste in choosing the finest ñandutí, the traditional Paraguayan lace that the women weave on a frame, spiderwebs of delicate, colorful thread. In the back part of her shop she had a small table where she read cards, Spanish or tarot, according to the customer’s preference. They say she was very good. I couldn’t say for sure because I’d never wanted her to read cards for me.

“Why don’t you come with me? We can take your husband. Has he been to Asunción?”

“No—as if.”

Natalia flip-flopped her way to the patio and greeted Uncle Carlos and Juan Martín with kisses on the cheek. She poured a whiskey with a lot of ice and stretched her toes. I emerged from the kitchen with swollen eyes and Juan Martín asked how I could be so dumb. “If you’d injured your corneas we’d have to rush back to Buenos Aires by plane.”

“Why?” asked Natalia, and she shook the ice in her glass so it sounded like little bells in the afternoon heat. “The hospital here is very good.”

“It doesn’t compare.”

“Well, aren’t you a citified little prick.” And after she said that, she invited him to Asunción. “I’m driving,” she told him. “You can buy stuff if you have money, everything’s cheap. It’s three hundred kilometers; we can go and come back the same day if we leave early.”

He accepted. Then he went to take a nap and didn’t even suggest I join him. I was grateful. I stayed with my cousin out on the hot porch, she with her whiskey, me with a cold beer. I couldn’t drink anything stronger. She told me about her new boyfriend, the son of the owner of the province’s largest supermarket chain. She always had rich boyfriends. This one mattered to her as little as the others, emotionally speaking, but she was interested in him because he had a plane. He’d taken her up in it the week before. “Beautiful,” she told me, “except it shakes a little. The smaller the plane the more it shakes.”

“I didn’t know that,” I told her.

“Me either. Aren’t we dumb, cousin, because it makes sense.

“Something terrifying happened to me while I was up there,” she went on. “We were flying over fields to the north, and suddenly I saw a very big fire. A house was burning, bright orange flames and a black cloud of smoke, and you could see the house collapsing in on itself. I stared and stared at the fire until he turned the plane and I lost sight of it. But ten minutes later we passed over the spot again and the fire had disappeared.”

“You must have gotten the place wrong. It’s not like you’re up in planes all the time and you can recognize the terrain from above.”

“You don’t understand, there was a patch of burned earth and the ruins of the house.”

“It went out, then.”

“How? Did the firefighters get there in five minutes? We’re talking wilderness here, babe, and the flames were really high when I saw them, and it wasn’t raining or anything! It could never have been put out in ten minutes.”

“Did you tell your boyfriend?”

“Sure, but he says I’m crazy, he never saw any fire.”

Our eyes met. I almost always believed her. Once, Natalia had stopped me from going into my grandmother’s room because she was in there, smoking. Our grandmother had been dead for ten years. I listened to her: I didn’t go in, but I smelled the penetrating odor of the Havana cigarillos that were her favorites, though there was no smoke in the air.

“You have to find out, then, ask around.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know if the fire already happened, or if it’s going to happen.”

*  *  *  *  *

It was still dark when we left, five in the morning. Juan Martín almost let us go alone, because according to him he’d barely slept at all, thanks to the heat and the power outage that had left him without a fan. But lying in the darkness, awake, I had listened to him snoring and talking in his sleep. He lied and complained, and every day was the same as the one before. Natalia had a Renault 12, the most common car there was during the eighties. When the sun started to come out over Route 11, I saw that, trapped under its windshield wipers, were the bodies of many dead damselflies. A lot of people get them confused with dragonflies, but the damselfly is different, though they’re in the same family. They’re less graceful, their horrible eyes are farther apart, and the body, that straight and vaguely phallic body, is longer. They’re lazier, too. I was always afraid of both of them and I never understood when they came into fashion years later with teenagers, who tattooed themselves with sentimental designs, dolphins and butterflies, and but also those horrible dragonflies with their blind eyes. Some people call them aguaciles—from the word agua—because bands of them tend to show up before it rains, when it’s really hot. That word makes me think of alguacil—sheriff—and I think a lot of people call the insect that, as if it were the police of the air.

The road to Asunción is boring and monotonous; at times it’s palm trees with marshlands, other times jungle, and much more rarely a small city or a village. Juan Martín slept in the backseat, and sometimes I looked at him in the rearview mirror: he was attractive in his privileged way, with his elegant haircut and his polo shirt with the Lacoste crocodile. Natalia was smoking her long Benson & Hedges, but we didn’t talk because she was driving very fast and the noise would have forced us to shout. I wanted to tell her more things about my marriage. Like how Juan Martín constantly chastised me. If I took too long to serve the table I was useless, just “standing there doing nothing, as always.” If I took too long to choose something, I was wasting his time—he was always so decisive and detached. If I deliberated for ten minutes about what restaurant to go to, it meant a night of his sighing and contrary replies. I always apologized so we wouldn’t fight, so things wouldn’t get worse. I never told him all the things that bothered me about him, like how he belched after eating, how he never cleaned the bathroom even though I begged him to, how he was always complaining about the quality of things, how when I asked him for a little humor he always said it was too late for that, he’d already lost his patience. But I kept quiet. When we stopped for lunch I split a polenta with my cousin while Juan Martín ate the same steak with salad he ate every day. He never wanted anything else. At most he’d try cutlets or shepherd’s pie. And pizza, but only on weekends.

He was boring and I was stupid. I felt like asking one of the truckers to run me over and leave me gutted on the road, split open like the dogs I saw occasionally lying dead on the asphalt. Some of them had been pregnant, too heavy to run fast and escape the murderous wheels, and their puppies lay agonizing around them.

When we were less than an hour from the border with Paraguay, we got our passports ready. The immigration officials were tall, dark soldiers. One of them was drunk. They let us through without paying much attention to us, though they checked out our asses and made crude comments, laughing. Their attitude was predictable and relatively respectful; they were there to instill fear, to dissuade any challenge. Juan Martín said—once we were far from the checkpoint—that we had to file a complaint.

“And just who are you going to complain to, buddy, when those guys are the government?” Natalia asked him, and I, who knew her well, heard something more than teasing in her voice; it held contempt. Then she looked at me incredulously. But none of us said anything more. Natalia, who knew her way around Asunción, got us straight to Market 4 and left the car locked two blocks away. We walked, accosted by watch and tablecloth vendors, begging children, a mother and her wheelchair-bound daughter—all under the watchful eyes of the soldiers with their greenish-brown uniforms and their enormous guns that looked ancient, out-of-date, little-used.

The heat and the smell of the market were a physical blow, and I came to a stop near an orange stand. In Paraguay they call them toronjas instead of naranjas, and the fruits have a kind of deformed belly button and a bland flavor. The fruit at the market stand was circled by those little flies that I hate, not because they disgust me but simply because I don’t know how to kill them. They were like little flying fragments of darkness because you had to have them very close to your eyes to see wings or legs or any bug-like characteristics. I didn’t buy any oranges even though the vendor lowered her price again and again: three guaraníes, two guaraníes, one guaraní. The porters ran down aisles pushing trolleys with boxes, some full of fruit, others filled with televisions and dual-cassette players, still others with clothes. Juan Martín was silent, and Natalia walked decisively ahead in her white dress and flat leather sandals. She had tied her hair back in the heat, and her ponytail swayed from side to side as if the wind blew only for her.

“This is all contraband,” Juan Martín said suddenly, loud enough for some stallholders and wandering vendors to turn and look at him. I stopped short and grabbed his arm. “Don’t talk like that,” I said into his ear.

“They’re all criminals, where have you brought me, this is your family?” The nausea mixed with the tears when I told him that we were going to talk later, that he should shut up now, that yes, there were probably some criminals there and they were going to kill us if he kept provoking them. I looked him up and down: his boat shoes, the sweat stains in his armpits, the sunglasses pushed up over his hair. I didn’t love him anymore, I didn’t desire him, and I would have handed him right over to Stroessner’s soldiers and let them do as they pleased.

I hurried to catch up with Natalia, who was already at the stand of the woman who sold ñandutí. A younger woman was weaving the cloth with vibrant colors. It was the only place in that endless and noisy market where there was something like calm. People stopped and asked about prices and the woman answered in a quiet voice, but they heard her in spite of the radios, the chamamé music, even a man who was playing the harp for the few tourists who had braved the trip into Asunción that hot morning to buy on the cheap. Natalia took her time. She debated between several tablecloths and finally chose five sets with their napkins; my favorites were the white one with details of every color around the edges and in the center—violet, blue, turquoise, green, red, orange, yellow—and another much more elegant one that used only a palette of browns, from beige to mahogany. She bought the five sets, some thirty table runners, and many details to sew onto dresses and shirts, especially on guayaberas that she bought at another stand farther on. To find it, we had to move deeper into the market. I followed her and didn’t even check to see whether Juan Martín was following me. I thought about why ñandutí was called “spiderweb” cloth. It must be because of the weaving technique, because really the end result seemed much more like a peacock’s tail: the feathers with their eyes, beautiful but disturbing. Many eyes arrayed above the animal, which walks so heavily—a beautiful animal, but one that always seems tired.

“Wouldn’t you like a guayabera for yourself, Martín?” Natalia called him Martín; she didn’t use his full name. Juan Martín was uncomfortable, but he tried to smile. I knew that expression, it was his tough guy face and it said I’m doing all I can, so that later, when everything went to hell once we got back, he could rub it in my face, smear it all over my mouth: I tried but you didn’t help at all, you never help. He bought the guayabera but didn’t want to try it on. “I have to wash it first,” he told me reproachfully, as if the shirt could be poisoned. He carried one of Natalia’s plastic bags for her—they weren’t even that heavy, it was only cloth—and he said, “Please, can we get out of this hellhole?” Since the exit wasn’t marked he had no choice but to follow us. To follow Natalia, really, and I saw the disgust and resentment in his eyes.

My cousin linked arms with me and pretended to admire a bracelet of silver and lapis lazuli that Juan Martín had given me on our honeymoon in Valparaíso.

“We all make mistakes,” she told me. “The important thing is to fix them.”

“And how does this get fixed?”

“Babe, death is the only problem without a solution.”

*  *  *  *  *

Juan Martín didn’t like the trip from the market to the bay; he thought the city looked dirty and poor. He didn’t like the presidential palace and later, at the beach along the river, he started practically shouting at us: how could we be so anesthetized, didn’t we see the potbellied kids eating watermelon under the beating sun, and right in front of the house of government, please, what a shitty country. We didn’t want to argue with him. The city was poor, and in the heat it smelled like garbage. But he wasn’t disgusted with Asunción, he was mad at us. I didn’t even feel like crying anymore. To placate him we looked for a restaurant around there, where the ministries were, the private schools, the embassies and hotels: Paraguay’s rich. We quickly came to the Munich, on Calle Presidente Franco. “Is it named after Franco, the dictator?” asked Juan Martín, but it was a rhetorical question. On the restaurant patio there was an enormous effigy of Saint Rita and the tables were empty, except the one in the middle, where three soldiers sat. We chose a table far from them so they wouldn’t overhear Juan Martín, and also because it is always preferable to sit far away from soldiers in Asunción. The walls were colonial, the square of sky above us was totally clear, but there was shade on the patio in spite of the heat. We ordered Paraguayan corn bread, and Juan Martín, a sandwich. The soldiers, drunk on beer—there were several empty bottles on the table and under their chairs—first told the waitress she was beautiful, and then one of them touched her ass, and it was like a movie in poor taste, a bad joke: the man with his uniform jacket unbuttoned over his distended belly, a toothpick between his teeth, the grotesque laughter, and the girl who tried to brush them off by asking, “Can I get you anything else?” But she didn’t dare insult them because they had their guns at their waists, and others were leaning against the flower bed behind them.

Juan Martín got up and I could just imagine what was going to happen next. He was going to yell at them to leave her alone; he was going to play the hero, and then they would arrest all three of us. They would rape Natalia and me in the dictator’s dungeons, day and night, and they would torture me with electric shocks on my pubic hair that was as blond as the hair on my head, and they would drool while they said fucking little gringa, fucking Argentine, and maybe they would kill Natalia quickly, for being dark, for being a witch, for being insolent. And all because he needed to be a hero and prove God only knows what. Anyway, he would have it easy because they killed men with a bullet through the back of the skull, and done. They weren’t fags, the Paraguayan soldiers, of course they weren’t.

Natalia stopped him.

“But don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re going to rape her.”

“I see everything,” said Natalia, “but we can’t do anything. We’re leaving now.” Natalia left money on the table and dragged Juan Martín toward the car. The soldiers didn’t even notice us, they were so focused on tormenting the girl. In the car, Juan Martín told us everything he thought about our cowardice and how sick and ashamed we made him. It was six in the afternoon. We had spent many hours shopping at the market and trying to sightsee on the oceanfront and downtown, putting up with my husband’s whining. Natalia wanted to get back early so we could have dinner in Corrientes, so she started the car and we headed out of Asunción as the sun was turning red and the fruit vendors were sitting down to drink something cool under their umbrellas.

*  *  *  *  *

The car stalled on the way back, somewhere in Formosa. It started bucking like a rebellious horse and then it stopped; when Natalia tried to start it again, I recognized the impotent sound of the motor, suffocated and exhausted. If it was going to turn over at all, it would be a while. The darkness was complete; along that stretch of the road there was no illumination. But the worst thing was the silence, barely cut by some nocturnal bird, by slidings through the plants—it was jungle there, thick vegetation—or by the occasional truck that sounded very far away, and that wasn’t going to come and save us.

“Why don’t you take a look under the hood?” I said to my husband. I’d already been fairly annoyed when he hadn’t offered to drive on the way back; he hadn’t even asked my cousin if she was tired. I didn’t know how to drive. Why was I so useless? Had I been so spoiled by my dead mother? Had it occurred to no one that I would ever have to solve problems by myself? Had I married this imbecile because I didn’t know what to do or how to work? In the darkness, in among the barely visible vegetation, the fireflies shone. I hate when people call them lightning bugs; firefly is a beautiful word. Once, I caught a bunch of them in an empty mayonnaise jar, and I realized how ugly they really are, like cockroaches with wings. But they’ve been blessed with the purest possible justice. Still and grounded, they look like a pest, but when they fly and light up, they are the closest thing to magic, a portent of beauty and goodness.

Juan Martín asked for a flashlight and went outside without griping. Looking at his face in the car’s weak interior light, before he got out, I realized that he was scared. He opened the hood and we turned off the light so as not to waste the battery. We couldn’t see what he was doing, but suddenly we heard him slam the hood down and run to get back into the car, sweat streaming down his neck.

“A snake went over my foot!” he shouted, and his voice broke as if he had phlegm in his throat. Natalia didn’t feel like pretending anymore and she laughed at him, pounding the steering wheel with her fists.

“You’re a real idiot,” she told him, and she dried the tears from her laughter.

“An idiot!” shouted Juan Martín. “What if it had bit me, and it was poisonous, what would we do then, huh? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

“Nothing’s going to bite you, take it easy.”

“What do you know?”

“More than you.”

The three of us were silent. I listened to Juan Martín’s breathing and I silently swore that I was never going to have sex with him again, not even if he held a gun to my head. Natalia got out of the car and told us to keep the windows rolled up if we didn’t want bugs to get in. “You’ll die of heat, but it’s one thing or the other.” Juan Martín grabbed his head and told me, “Never again, we’re never coming here again, you understand me?” Natalia was walking on the empty road and I shined the flashlight on her from inside the car. She was smoking and thinking; I knew her. Juan Martín tried to start the car again, but it sounded more labored and slow than before. “I’m sure your cousin forgot to put water in it,” he told me. “No,” I replied, “because the car isn’t overheated, didn’t you see that when you looked at the motor? What did you see, huh? You don’t know anything, Juan Martín.” And I stretched out in the backseat, took off my shirt, and lay there in only my bra.

Once, we had made this same trip with my uncle Carlos and my mom. I don’t remember why they needed to go to Asunción. They’d sung songs the whole way there, I remembered that for sure: local songs of legend, love, and loss like “El Puente Pexoa,” “El Pájaro Chogui,” and “El Cosechero.” On the way I had to pee, and I couldn’t bring myself to pull down my shorts behind a tree. We pulled into a service station, my uncle asked the attendant for the key, and I went into the little bathroom on the side of the building, the one the truckers used. That little bathroom still haunts my dreams. The smell was brutal. There were fingerprints of shit on the sky-blue tiles; with no toilet paper in sight, many people had used their hands to wipe. How could they do such a thing? The black lid of the toilet was full of bugs. Locusts, mostly, and crickets. They made a terrible noise, a buzzing that sounded like the motor of a refrigerator. I ran out crying, and I pulled down my shorts and peed beside the service station. I didn’t say a word about it to my uncle or my mother. I never told them about the stagnant shit in the toilet, the handle dirty with brown fingerprints, the green locusts that almost completely covered the single bulb hanging from the ceiling with no shade over it. After the bathroom I don’t remember anything about that trip. My mother talked about how we’d stopped at a beautiful colonial hotel, but how at night you could see rats running around in the yard. I have absolutely no memory of that hotel, or of the rain and hail that had burst over us afterward and delayed our return. That trip, for me, ended in the locust-filled bathroom.

Juan Martín was saying he could walk down the road to who knows what place he had seen lit up, and I didn’t answer. If he was afraid of snakes, how was he ever going to make it there? The creatures were constantly going back and forth across the road. Natalia had finished her cigarette—at least, you could no longer see its tip burning in the darkness like one more firefly—but she didn’t get back into the car. She wanted to wait outside in case a car passed, sure. Someone who would take her to a phone so she could call the automobile club, for example. Plus, she couldn’t have felt much like being in the car with the two of us, and who could blame her after she’d tolerated a whole day of Juan Martín, not to mention me and my passivity.

The lights of the truck lit up the road and the wheels raised a cloud of dust. It was strange because up there in the north, in spite of the heat, there was almost never dry dust in the air because it rained a lot, if not every day. It was always humid and the dirt stuck fast to the ground. But that was how it pulled up: as if borne along on a sandstorm. Natalia had set out the beacon, a triangle that shone phosphorescent in the night, but you could tell she didn’t have faith in it because she opened the door, grabbed the flashlight from the driver’s seat, and started to wave her arms and shout “Hey, hey, help, help!” I didn’t see the driver’s face: it was a trailer truck and Natalia had to climb up to talk to him when he stopped, without turning off the motor. Two minutes later, she grabbed her purse and cigarettes and said the guy was going to take her to the service station to call for help. He’d also told her we were close to Clorinda, and that he couldn’t bring all three of us because there wasn’t enough room. The truck disappeared along the dark road as suddenly as it had arrived, and I realized all the things I hadn’t asked Natalia: how long would it take, was the service station nearby, why didn’t they go to Clorinda if it was close, did the trucker seem trustworthy, what should we do if another truck or even a car came by—should we stop it?

“We forgot to ask her to get water,” said Juan Martín, and it was the first sensible thing he’d said since morning.

My heart started to beat faster: What if we got dehydrated? I rolled down the windows without giving a thought to the bugs. What could they be, other than moths, beetles, crickets? Maybe a bat. Juan Martín said, “Your cousin is irresponsible. She brings us all the way out here where no cars ever pass without even making sure this wreck could run.”

“How do you know whether she took the car in?” I asked him, furious, and I thought it would be easy to kill him right there; I could get a screwdriver from the trunk and stab it into his neck. I knew he didn’t want to kill me, he just wanted to treat me badly and break me so I’d hate my life and wouldn’t even have the guts left to change it. He started to turn on the radio and I almost told him to stop, we had to conserve the battery, but then I let him do it. I was enjoying his ignorance; how I was going to relish it when the tow truck came and he had to explain that he’d used up the battery looking for who knows what on the radio. What could be on the radio around there at night? Chamamé and more chamamé, and some lonely people who called in and cried and remembered their children who had died in the Malvinas.

The rescue mechanics arrived an hour later. As I’d imagined, they chastised Juan Martín for having the radio on. He sputtered excuses. The mechanics got to work and Juan Martín acted like he was supervising them. I got out and took Natalia’s hand.

“You can’t even imagine what a hottie the trucker is. One of those Swedes from Oberá. I mean this guy is smoking. He’s going to spend the night in Clorinda, and I think I’ll stay with him. If the car gets going, that idiot husband of yours can take you to Corrientes,” she said to me in a low voice.

But the car didn’t start and they had to tow the three of us to Clorinda. The car stayed in the city’s automobile club branch, but the mechanics very kindly took us to the hotel Natalia directed them to, pompously called The Ambassador. It was white and had colonial arches, but I knew, just from looking at it from outside, that it was going to smell of damp and maybe wouldn’t have hot water. It had a restaurant, though, or more like a grill, with white plastic tables where a family and several solitary men were sitting. “We’re going to shower,” I told Juan Martín, “and then let’s get something to eat.”

As they were handing us the hotel keys, a man who could only be the trucker came into the reception area. Natalia went skipping over to him like a teenager. The guy was two heads taller than her, and had muscled arms and blond hair cut very short. “Hello,” he said to us, and he smiled. He seemed charming but he could be anything, a degenerate, a wife beater, a rapist—since he was extremely good looking, any girl would rather see him as a golden prince of the highway. I greeted him; Juan Martín took the key and looked at me so I would follow him. I did. Natalia called after me that we’d meet up in an hour to eat and I thought: how tragic, she gets an hour with that sweet-smiling Viking, while I spend an hour tolerating my husband.

Juan Martín yelled at me: “Not once, not even once did you take my side, do you realize? Not about anything. All day long.” He shouted that Natalia was a whore, that she went off with the first guy who crossed her path. He shouted that I was a whore too because I’d been making eyes at the goddamn blond barbarian. I told him that blond barbarian had rescued us on the highway, and that at the very least he could have thanked him. “You’re rude,” I yelled. “You’re coarse.”

“I’m coarse? You fucking little brat,” he shouted, and he went into the bathroom and slammed the door. From there he shouted more and cursed because there was no hot water and because the towels reeked of mildew, and finally he came out and threw himself on the bed. “You have nothing to say.”

“What do you want me to say?” I answered.

“You may want to leave me now,” he said, “but you’ll see when we get back to Buenos Aires, things will be better.”

“What if they aren’t?” I asked him.

“You’re not going to leave me that easy,” he said, and he lit a cigarette. I took a cold shower and thought that maybe, when I came out, he would have fallen asleep and the cigarette would have lit the sheets on fire and he would die there, in the Clorinda hotel. But when I came out, cold and wet, my blond hair dripping and pathetic, he was waiting for me dressed and perfumed to go to dinner.

“I’m sorry,” he told me. “Sometimes I’m impossible.”

“Let’s go eat,” I said, and I put on a loose dress and barely dragged a comb through my hair. I wanted the blond trucker to see me like that, freshly bathed and a bit disheveled. When Juan Martín tried to kiss me, I turned my cheek. But he didn’t say anything—he resigned himself.

In the grill there were only two men, my cousin, and the blond trucker left. A dark-haired girl asked us what we wanted and said there was only short ribs, chorizo (she could make sandwiches), and mixed salad. We said yes to everything and ordered a cold soda. I was more thirsty than hungry, even though at the entrance to Clorinda I’d bought a grapefruit Fanta that was nice and cold. It was my favorite soda; for some reason you couldn’t get it anymore in Buenos Aires, but it still existed in the interior—maybe they were old bottles, or maybe they still produced it there. Things took longer to disappear up there in the north.

The men were telling ghost stories. Natalia was sitting very close to the blond guy, and they were sharing a cigarette. He had opened his white shirt a little; he was tanned, he was marvelous.

“Something really strange happened to me not long ago,” said the splendid blond.

“Tell us, buddy, no one’s sleeping here!” shouted another one of the truckers, who was drinking beer. Was he going to get back on the road like that, half drunk? There were always accidents out on these roads, and this was probably why. My uncle Carlos, for example, never got behind the wheel if he was wasted, but he was an exception among his friends and even in our family.

“Should I tell it?” asked the blond, and he looked at my cousin. Natalia smiled at him and nodded.

“Okay,” he agreed, and he told us that he came from Oberá province, he lived in Misiones, and that around twenty kilometers away there was a town called Campo Viera. A creek ran through it, the Yazá. “One afternoon, the middle of the day, right? Don’t get the idea I imagined this because it was night. I wasn’t drunk, either. So, one afternoon I went out there in the small truck, just to run an errand was all, and as I was driving over the Yazá bridge I saw this woman run across the road. I didn’t have time to swerve, I would’ve killed myself, and I felt the bump from her body, man. I jumped out of the truck and ran to her, cold sweat all down my back, but I didn’t see anyone. No blood, no dented fender, nothing. I went to the cops and they took my statement, but they were in a shitty mood about it. I had to run the errand another day, and when I was in Campo Viera I told the story just like I’m telling you. They told me that the military had built that bridge, and they’d put dead people in the cement, people they’d murdered, to hide their bodies.”

I heard Juan Martín sigh. He didn’t like this kind of story.

“You shouldn’t fuck around when it comes to things like that,” he told the blond guy.

“Excuse me, sir, but I’m not fucking around. The military is perfectly capable of hiding their corpses that way.”

Our food came and Juan Martín started to eat. They brought us wooden plates. I’ve always preferred those to ceramic ones for eating barbecue. The flavor is richer and the oil on the salad is absorbed better and doesn’t reach the meat. It was delicious.

The blond guy said that in Campo Viera they’d told him a lot of other things about the bridge and the stream. “That whole area is strange,” he said. “You see car headlights but the cars never come, like they’ve disappeared down some road. But there are no drivable roads, it’s all jungle.”

“Speaking of cars that disappear, here’s a funny one,” said one of the other truck drivers, smiling, maybe to clear away the heavy atmosphere and my husband’s antipathy. I felt ashamed again and I smiled at the blond truck driver, who had a delicious dimple in his chin, and he smiled back at me. Hopefully he’d become Natalia’s boyfriend, and then she’d get bored with him like she did with all of them and then he would realize that always, from the very first moment when we’d looked into each other’s eyes in the hotel lobby, he’d been in love with me.

“And it happened right here! Well, at the grill off the highway, ten blocks from here. So this guy comes with his mobile home, a real pretty little house. He was with his family, two kids, they told me, and his wife and mother-in-law. So they went to eat some barbecue and they left the mother-in-law in the mobile home. She didn’t feel good or something like that.”

“Then what?” asked the third truck driver, who looked sleepy.

“Someone swiped the mobile home with the old lady in it!”

Everyone laughed hard, even the waitress, who was tending the fire as it died down. The guy had been desperate; he’d run to the police and he spent about a week in Clorinda, with his wife having a nervous breakdown. There was a massive search all over Formosa and they found the mobile home, but it was empty. Everything had been stolen, including the mother-in-law.

“How long ago was this?” Natalia wanted to know.

“Hmm…must be a year ago now. Time sure flies. A year. It was a crazy case. I’m sure the thieves got into the mobile home and they didn’t realize the old lady was inside and maybe she died on them from the fright, and then they tossed her. Around here you can just toss anyone, there’s no way in hell they’ll find you.”

“The man still calls all the time,” the girl from the restaurant broke in. “But the woman never turned up.”

“The thieves didn’t either,” added the trucker. “Poor gal, what a way to go.”

They went on for a while talking about the mother-in-law’s disappearance, and Juan Martín, annoyed, excused himself and went up to the room. I’ll wait for you, said his look, and I nodded. But I stayed there until very late; my hair dried and the girl gave us the key to the fridge so we could go on taking out beers. Natalia even told the story about the burning house she’d seen from her boyfriend’s plane, although she said he was her cousin. Then she yawned and announced she was going up to sleep. The blond trucker followed her. I went after them to the reception desk and asked for another room. I told the girl that my husband was very tired and that if I went in at that hour, I’d wake him up. Then the next day, if the mechanic brought the car, he would have to drive to Buenos Aires badly rested, because he had a hard time going back to sleep when someone woke him up. “Sure,” said the woman at reception—it was all women at that hotel, apparently—“we hardly have any guests, it’s the low season.”

“Low season is right,” I told her, and when I laid my head down on the pillow, I fell asleep immediately and had nightmares about an old woman who was running, naked and engulfed in flames, through a house that was collapsing. I saw her from outside, but I couldn’t go in and help her because a beam was going to fall and hit my head, or the fire would get to me or the smoke would suffocate me. But I didn’t run for help, either; I just watched her burn.

*  *  *  *  *

The auto club brought our car in the morning. They explained the problem, but in very general terms, taking it as given that neither Natalia nor I would understand anything. The only thing we wanted to know was if it would make it to Corrientes, and he told us sure, it was only three hours away. We’d still need to take it in to get a more permanent fix, but any mechanic would realize the problem right away and if not, we should call them. We thanked them and went to have breakfast. There was only toast and coffee—not even a croissant—but it was fine. The blond trucker had left two hours earlier. He’d promised to call Natalia and she thought he would come through. “He fucks like a god,” she told me. “And he’s the sweetest guy.”

I envied her. I choked down the half-cold coffee with my tears and went to find Juan Martín. But when I went into the room, he wasn’t there. The bed wasn’t even unmade, as if he hadn’t slept there. I couldn’t be sure he had gone back to the room; I hadn’t even seen him go into the hotel. I went back to the breakfast room and asked Natalia. “I definitely saw him go inside,” she said. The girl at reception assured us he had taken the key with him. At least, she definitely didn’t have it hanging on the key rack on the wall.

“Maybe he went for a walk,” she murmured.

But, of course, she hadn’t seen him come down. I got nervous and my hands started shaking. I told Natalia we had to call the police, but she put her hair back into a ponytail like she’d done in the market and told me no. “Don’t be silly. If he left, he left,” she said.

She stood up and went to her room to get her purse and the bags with yesterday’s purchases.

“You look spooked, babe.”

It was true. I was disconcerted. I went back to the room where Juan Martín should have slept, and I didn’t see his bag or his toothbrush that he always placed meticulously in the bathroom when we traveled. The shower was dry. The still-damp towels were the ones I had used the night before.

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s going to rain,” said the front-desk girl as she waved good-bye. “That’s what the radio says, but it sure doesn’t look like it, the sky’s all clear.”

“I hope it does. This sticky heat is something awful,” answered Natalia.

“What about your friend’s husband?” she asked as if I weren’t right there.

“Oh, there was a misunderstanding.”

I settled into the passenger seat. Before leaving Clorinda we stopped at the service station. Natalia needed cigarettes and I needed another grapefruit Fanta. One of the truckers from the night before, the one who’d been sleepy and barely listened to the others’ stories, was gassing up. He waved to us, asked how we were, and looked into the backseat. He was probably looking for Juan Martín, but he didn’t ask about him. We smiled and waved good-bye, and headed out to the highway. On the horizon along the river, you could already see the black clouds of the gathering storm.