Read an Excerpt
The director will take the hand the attendant offers to help her up the stairs; she doesn’t use it for support, though it may appear she does. Her arm rises or, rather, falls as she climbs the stairs, on her way to the first-class car. And she releases the attendant’s hand long enough to slip off one glove, which stops, hangs in the air, and continues on, clutched in her other hand, because the hand wearing it has left the rail to take hold of the handle that opens the door. The director thanks the next attendant and tells him to take the luggage to her compartment, her voice at once grave, sharp, intense, quiet; she listens with satisfaction as her words take effect, their resonance eliminating all else in the ears of the attendant who replies:
“At your service.”
The director opens the curtain in her compartment’s sleeper car ever so slightly. The light enters, casting her in shadow such that someone watching from outside wouldn’t be able to see her: she’s not there opening the curtain, she can’t see anything out the window, though the platform is moving relative to her and the curtain and the glass. She doesn’t touch the lamps, sit on the sofa, or use the ashtrays, and yet the lamps shine, the sofa is soft and inviting, and the ashtrays smolder for someone, whoever it is, who may be sleeping in that compartment, under her name, behind the Do Not Disturb sign that hangs from the doorknob all night. She closes the door, stays inside, or leaves and walks to the dining car, her footsteps not causing the floor in the hallway to creak even once: nobody sees her, sees them; nobody recognizes her, everybody imagines that she must have a male companion who will be coming in after her. The only person not paying attention is the commentator, absorbed in his steaming cup of matico, yet he’s the only one to greet her with any perceptible gesture, inclining his head and instinctively lifting the hat from the seat beside him. An irregularity in the rails forces the director to drop into a seat at the adjacent table, and she sits there for the next hour; from the vantage point of the man in the corner, dozing behind a weekly paper, she boarded at the Temuco station and went directly into the dining car, and the cigarette in that glittering hand—her painted nails aren’t visible to him—will smolder all the way to Chillán even though it’s been stubbed out. The commentator sets his cup on the coaster, rummages in his pocket, there’s a metallic scraping sound and the lighter flame flickers to life: they’re not husband and wife, the waiter with a napkin over his arm realizes as he moves down the aisle past them; he was sure they were a couple who’d been together for decades when he saw them come in through the same door at the same station, and yet, not so; they’re strangers, meeting now for the first time, he realizes this immediately when he sees the man offer her a light, and he puts away the handkerchief he just ran across his neck, crosses his arms in the doorway to the car, and prepares to guess what’ll happen next: now the man will ask for the drink menu. But no, the commentator’s eyes remain fixed on the infinity of interwoven trees outside the opposite window, he doesn’t smile at the director, she doesn’t smile at him either, and yet both acknowledge the other’s gesture: she inhales, but doesn’t let the flame touch the tip of her cigarette; he lowers the warm lighter to the table, and she, out of habit, breathes out through a space between her teeth, though she doesn’t exhale smoke, and yet two, six, a whole pack’s worth of cigarettes burn down to nothing between her fingers.
“An Araucano.”
The director raises her hand and her voice toward the waiter, the only person there who understands what she says as an order: the table is already set with the silverware, the napkin, the liquor, and the contents of the bowl, every word that she utters and he writes down will eventually end up in a whicker trashcan in the kitchen car.
“Neat,” she adds. “And some olives.”
In the end, even the serenity of the director turning the pages of what she is and isn’t reading—a book and also a magazine, pure propaganda—stands out against the calm of the commentator as he shifts his gaze from one tree to the next, looking out the window into the fading twilight, under the rain, as his forehead tilts toward this or that hill, and as his shoulders absorb the jolts from an irregularity in the metal of the tracks and the train enters a clearing that suddenly opens up out the window, speeds past adobe houses, dogs, children who come out of the mud and start running, expressions of urgency on their faces, after the express train, until the wood of the bridge bursts violently into view and the valley opens up and with a clatter the rumble that never stops returns; for the blink of an eye it seemed that all the men in the dining car were equal in their deafness, all of them dressed in suits that looked shabby alongside the cream or violet or red of the director’s dress or, maybe, her lack of dress in the imaginations of some of those men who don’t look at her yet can’t stop looking her in the dining car: she sat there all through dinner and is sitting there still reading, she hasn’t left her compartment, yet everyone knows she boarded the first-class car, and when the waiter—he’s been watching her without watching her too—brings her drink, the polished shoe on her foot, firmly placed, invisible at the end of her long leg, gets in his way and down he goes, the tray with napkins, glass, notepad, is sent flying and, with a crash, falls on the indifferent figure of the director, who doesn’t shriek or cry out or complain, she doesn’t even lift her hands to her drenched torso, her voice just releases a brief string of words that—like the bonfire burning between four houses they just passed, like the lantern at a rural train station and the person wearily holding it up even though the express train doesn’t stop for the eyes of the commentator, still looking out the window—everyone already forgot, her voice (they don’t even remember that a woman had been in the dining car on the night the commentator traveled to the opening ceremony of the 1962 World Cup in Santiago) that said:
“It’s fine, don’t worry. Please. Just bring me a double cortado. No sugar.”
