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Patagonia, beautiful and diabolical. Her anguish and perplexity grew with every passing minute. Like all housewives, of each and every epoch, Delia was very stuck on schedules, a slave to them even when she thought she was their master. And here it seemed as if schedules did not exist, directly. Th e day went on. It actually scared her a little. Strange atmospheric phenomena seemed to be occurring: a curtain of clouds had risen from the horizon, and in the heights of the sky there were disordered movements . . . While on the surface reigned an astonishing calm. Th at by itself was strange, threatening, and together with the persistence of the light, the calm was beginning to give the
castaway chills. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her. She couldn’t, and now she hardly tried; but still she felt that it had happened, or was happening, enough to make her believe it, and leave behind her smooth and flat reality, her life of schedules.
    Where could I be? she wondered.
    Th e belief had a name: Patagonia.
    Th e circumstances made Delia practical. Goodbye to her funereal philosophies, her fantasies of a housewife in black! Suddenly there were more urgent matters to resolve. Th e simple fact of being alive and not dead had unexpected consequences. How simple the causes are, how complicated the effects!
    She had to find shelter. A place to spend the night. Because the night, which had not yet come, would waste no time arriving, and then she would really be in trouble. Much more than she imagined, even though it would be precisely what she was imagining: a night without a moon, without light, everything transformed into horrors . . . Th at was what was beyond her imagination: the nature of the transformations. Because she saw nothing around her that could be susceptible to turning into something else, not a tree, not a rock . . . Th e clouds? She couldn’t conceive of being afraid of a cloud. And as for the air, it wasn’t susceptible to taking shapes.
    But still, there were things there. She wasn’t in the ether. Th e faltering afterglow at the end of the long twilight was there, showing her millions of objects: grasses, thistles, pebbles, clods of earth, anthills, bones, shells of armadillos, dead birds, stray feathers, ants, beetles . . .
    And the great gray plateau.

15
    WHAT DELIA DIDN’T know, in that endless twilight, was that there was a night in this story of hers. She was unaware of it because she’d spent it in a coma inside the remains of the Chrysler smashed against the truck-planet.
    Ramón Siffoni, her husband, had driven all night in his little red truck without giving himself a minute’s rest. He didn’t even think of stopping to sleep for a while, not at all. He saw the moon rise before him, an orange disk gushing light, and he felt like the master of the hours and the nights, of all of them without exceptions or interruptions, in a perfect continuum. His concentration at the wheel was perfect too. Th e night had arrived in the midst of this concentration, while the truck passed like a toy through the sleeping towns. Suddenly it was the desert, and suddenly it was night. Th e towns became jumbled arrangements of stones, the kind that radiated darkness. Th e cities rose out of the earth. Th ey were not cities: no one lived in them. But they resembled cities as one drop of water resembles another. Th e fact that there was no one in them only meant that no one had to orient themselves on their rough escarpments. Th eir streets ran according to a general abstract orientation, like the map of the moon. It was when he was crossing the Río Colorado that the moon came out, over the bridge, and Ramón was mesmerized, his eyes like two stars. A great unknown plateau had placed itself between him and the horizon, taking the place of his concentration. Th ere was nothing there.
    A phenomenon had taken place without him knowing it, a phenomenon that was unrecorded but very common in Patagonia: the atmospheric