Roadside outside Cachi, province of Salta, Argentina They found a room above L’Aquila bar in Cachi. There was no aircon and the town baked. He and the woman lay abed, the woman who had trusted him, the skinny, redheaded woman, lying in her sodden underwear, delirious beside him. Juan remembered the journey. The land rolling on. Telegraph wires, burned forest, a strawberry sow belly-belted to a tree. He had studied the birds. Doves, parakeets, and, like sentries, those villainous, anvil-headed hawks at the roadside, some glory crushed to grimness within them, a carrion majesty. After that room another room. Bed, table, a window over the Ninth of July Plaza and its palms. Shoeshiners packing up, waggling their thumbs at each other, those flat and ebonised thumbs. And the fan’s engine, the soundtrack to their days, plastic and brass grinding together, impossible to ignore but how quickly he learned to ignore it, turning on the television he would not turn off, despite the woman’s protestations, surfing towards the Disaster Channel.
