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?