—
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 them 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.