According to what they told me as I ate breakfast, the professor had left after eating and had left a note for us with a telephone number, asking us to get in contact with her when we returned to La Paz. Don Gastón, since we were friends of Marta’s, only charged us the minimum for one day, without extras or food, and got us one of the few taxis in the village to return to La Paz. We made the journey in the company of some cholas with black braids and bowler hats, who unloaded thick bundles of multicolored cloth into the trunk of the vehicle, and who didn’t open their mouths once in the whole trip, probably from lack of air, since Proxi and I also traveled in the backseat (Jabba wouldn’t have fit). When we walked through the doors of our hotel, we felt at home. It was so strange to think about everything that had happened to us that we simply decided not to think about it. It was as if there were a hole in time; three months could have passed, or years, because the hours had dilated in an extraordinary way and it was unbelievable that only a day had gone by since we had left there.
