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I spent the whole night with my eyes shut tight, buoyed on the breathing of my bed neighbor, trying to seduce sleep, to cajole it, like an exhibitionist whose wiles wouldn’t fool the most gullible schoolgirl — feigning indifference, spying on its movements with sideways glances, waiting for it around corners, placing decoys and candies in its path, sweet thoughts that might lure it closer and induce it to open wide its arms and engulf me. Several times, I faked a declaration of defeat, to speed things up. Nothing worked. Only when I truly abandoned all hope and resigned myself sincerely to lying awake all night did I plummet into a dense, black, dreamless sleep.
I woke with a start and leaped out of bed. Without even checking the time, before assessing the strength of the daylight seeping through the still-drawn curtains, I knew I’d overslept and that it must be late. The boy’s bed was empty. I stumbled around the wardrobe that obstructed the access to the balcony and pulled the curtain back. It was getting light. No, it was getting dark, and there was nothing but a grimy afterglow left in the sky. Just then, the streetlights came on, highlighting the cruel practical joke that I had begun to understand was being played on me. Their pale pink glow deepened to orange. I stared dumbfounded at them until they turned yellow. A joke, a prank; I had been swindled, robbed of the whole day. Never in my life, not even when I was fifteen years old, had I slept this late.
The bad news was confirmed when I saw the time. It was after seven thirty, barely twenty minutes before our appointment. I dived wildly at my suitcase, yanked on new clothes, and pounded down the hall to the shared bathroom. I washed my face while trying to calculate how long it would take to get to the café. I’d only just make it on foot, but I didn’t dare risk trying for a taxi; I couldn’t bear the idea of standing still on the curb, trusting to luck.
I passed the unmanned desk and charged out into the street. The pavement was slippery, and I kept almost falling over or knocking people down as I ran. I tried hard to blank out my mind, and before long it really was blank. By the time I got to the other side of the road from the café, I was ten minutes late. My mouth tasted of blood, my chest hurt, and my back was running with sweat under my coat. Through the windowpanes, I could see the old ladies sitting at the same tables as yesterday. A bored waiter was gnawing at his nails behind the bar. There was no sign of her, or of old Pedro.
I did suddenly spot the boy from the hotel, strolling out of the café while zipping up an enormous parka. He met my eyes for a second. Not in a shamefaced way, but not mockingly either; it was a friendly look, somehow, that suggested I should take things as they come and bow to the inevitable, like a good sport. He then got into a car that was double parked right outside the café. The windows were misted up on the driver’s side, but as it pulled away I made out the profile of old Pedro, grimly set. Not with the grimness of a kidnapper or a gangster — more the generic solemnity that comes over people when they sit behind a wheel.
I wavered between screaming insults at the top of my voice, racing after them in futile pursuit, stamping my feet childishly, and breaking down in tears. Desperate to avoid the latter, without thinking, I jumped into the road with not one but both arms aloft, and almost got myself run over by an unoccupied taxi. I opened the door and flung myself into the back seat. I knew there was nothing for it but to utter the fateful phrase, the most preposterous phrase in the world, the phrase toward which, as I should have divined long before, my quest had been inexorably propelling me from the start.
“Follow that car, please.”
The cabdriver chuckled, of course. Unsurprised, like someone hearing a stale joke that had once been funny (later he explained that it really was nothing unusuaclass="underline" not a week went by without him or a colleague being instructed to follow some car).
And follow he did, raising neither questions nor objections. We stuck close to our quarry’s taillights through the downtown streets, jammed with traffic at that hour, abuzz with stores that were still open and with last-minute shoppers. We crawled from traffic light to traffic light until we left downtown and its bustle behind. Everything slid in slow motion past the windows. People drive the way they are, and old Pedro drove deliberately and methodically, unimaginatively, without jumping a single yield sign.
The cabdriver soon grew bored with this dreary chase. He started reminiscing about similar cases, fortunately not angling for the details of my own. At first, I felt obligated to reply, as a matter of decency and also because I was terrified that he might simply up and decide he’d had enough and call the whole adventure off. As we approached the edge of town along ever-wider roads, we lapsed into silence. Once on the ring roads, the traffic thinned out; then, finally, we found ourselves on a deserted highway. It was easy to maintain the requisite distance from the other car, which continued to respect the letter and spirit of every article in the traffic code, signaling without fail every time it changed lanes.
Night had closed in completely. We cruised past residential suburbs, industrial parks, bars, and empty lots. With every white line the windshield swallowed up, the glow of the city lights grew fainter behind us. Markers slipped by on the right, keeping a monotonous tally of every mile put behind us. I began to count them in an attempt to blank out my thoughts, with relative success. At the thirty-two mark, the driver stopped the meter. When he spoke, it felt like the first human utterance there had been inside that car for centuries.
“City rates end here.”
This sounded positively threatening.
“It’s going to cost you a fortune.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty on me.”
I tried to ingratiate myself with some jovial sociability. But I didn’t sound very convincing, and the driver withdrew into an impregnable silence as somber as the night outside. I could feel his bad temper making the air inside the car unbreathable. I rolled the window down a little, then up again. Down and up, over and over, as we went several miles further into the increasingly solid darkness that hemmed the highway. By this point, there were hardly any houses or lights or anything at all to be seen beyond the ditch. I fastened my eyes on the taillights of the other car as if to magnetize them with my gaze and prevent them from vanishing into the murk without warning. Any moment now, on the basis of whatever flimsy excuse, the cabdriver was going to run out of patience.
And I thought that his chance for an excuse had arrived when old Pedro moved into the right-hand lane to take the exit marked by a sign a quarter mile ahead. I just had time to make out the icon of a skier over a superfluous caption reading “Ski Resorts”. The cabdriver hesitated.
“So, what do we do here?”
Desperately, I talked him into continuing, while practically turning the wheel for him with my eyes, or so it felt. I had more than enough cash, this was a matter of life and death, and taxis were a public service — once the meter was ticking we were bound by contract, if we were to turn back now, I would regard the entire fare as null and void.
On hearing this about the fare, the driver gave a jerk and braked. I was afraid he was going to argue, or throw me out of his cab then and there, in the middle of the frontage road. I was sufficiently fired up to fight him in earnest, to wrest the wheel from him, to leave him on the roadside or lock him in the trunk. After a few seconds that seemed like an eternity — the other car was getting farther away, its taillights now miniscule — he stepped on the accelerator. The speedometer shot up, along with the fare, of which he intended to collect every cent.
We made up for lost ground. Now we were climbing a narrow, extremely winding road, with no traffic coming the other way and no signs of life on either side. The headlights illuminated the identical trunks of tall mountain spruce trees beyond the ditches.