This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  So here you have one of the paradoxes of hitchhiking. I’m scared of some drivers and they’re scared of me. Yet, actually, it’s simple. You flick your blinker on, stop for a few seconds, lower your window, look the hitchhiker in the eye, ask where he’s going, and say, “OK, get in.” And if you don’t trust him, you lie. “Sorry, I’m going somewhere else.” That works for them and for me. I know there’s one thing that complicates everything, of course: the damn briefcase. The mystery of the briefcase. What’s inside it. Since a driver only has a few seconds to decide, the imagination has to work very fast. There are “before” people and “after” people. Some see the hatchet I’m going to use to kill them and chop them up. Others, bundles of banknotes I’ve stolen from someone I’ve already killed. Some ask me as soon as I get in the car, to break the ice and maybe to drive away dark forebodings: “So, are you a traveling salesman?” They think they know me, or they’ve seen me somewhere, or they feel sort of superior because they’re helping me.

  Sometimes I can see they’re tense, so I prefer to lie, because that calms them. I say, “Yeah, that’s right.” I have several answers, perfected by habit or my TV-schooled imagination. “So, are you a traveling salesman?” they ask.

  “At least I try,” I say, patting the briefcase.

  “You got me! Guilty!” I raise my hand as if about to swear on the Bible.

  “Yes, but don’t worry, I won’t try to sell you anything,” I say.

  It’s not always easy, but I try to guide the conversation so they don’t go changing the subject and come up with something weird. I invent a kind of salesman’s job, but it has to be something big so I can’t carry samples, only catalogues, which I won’t get out because I don’t want to bore them. I represent a company making construction cranes. I sell garden swimming pools. I specialize in cinema seats. I’ve invented a lot of professions for myself, and more than once I’ve had to improvise an expert’s description, piling on unnecessary details and absurd technical flourishes, which are more difficult to detect.

  I must admit that at moments like this the adrenaline of deceit makes me sweat, yet it also gives me a feeling of inner well-being, as if at last what I’ve been doing all these years is really paying off.

  Then, by way of counterpoint, I also want to note that some drivers don’t open their mouths in the twenty-some minutes of the ride. They’re not bothered by silence and don’t turn on the radio or anything. You sit beside them and it’s as if you’re not there. They’ve done enough by inviting you to get in. If you try to start up a conversation out of courtesy, they answer with a single word, which might be timid like a lamb bleating or threatening like a lion’s roar. You immediately understand that it’s best to leave them alone. Then, since you know every inch of the landscape, you discreetly check out the inside of the car and put together a portrait of the driver using the signs you pick up: if he’s one of those people who wash the car every Sunday because they don’t know what to do with their free time; if he’s nervous because he’s grabbing the steering wheel too tight; if he’s slack because the cancer awareness ribbon hanging off his rearview mirror is from five years ago. You have to do it, have to find some moments of mental escape, because if you don’t, there comes a point when the silence solidifies in the car and starts stabbing at your temples and thumping in your chest, you sink lower and lower in the seat, the seat belt starts throttling you, and the road threatens to swallow you in its darkness. You feel dizzy and close your eyes, and you know he won’t turn to look at you because, for him, you’re not there. Sometimes this bad scene lasts only a few seconds, but other times you get out of the car numb and downhearted, with the sensation that the trip has lasted three long, long years, during which you’ve rapidly aged. All your muscles ache, and you stretch your legs as if you’ve just crossed half Europe in one go. Yes, there are days like that.

  * * *

  One of the usual questions they ask when I get in a car is why I hitch rides at my age. Some mention the age thing with a touch of disdain or concern, as if they think I’m addled or something, because they consider it’s unlikely that I’d be doing it because I want to. Others take it for granted that it’s just this once—that I’m in a tight spot and forced to do it. So they’re astonished when I tell them I don’t have a car or a driver’s license and this is how I get around when I’m doing my job.

  What I don’t tell them is that I started almost by accident. I like my sleep and the first day I had to go to Vic with my brand-new briefcase, I missed the bus. The next bus was an hour later and I was left standing there, instinctively thumbing a ride, like I’d seen the young folks doing. I didn’t even have to wait five minutes before someone picked me up. By the time we got to the straight stretch near Sant Hipòlit, we’d already overtaken the bus. There are habits that start out of carelessness or pressing need, and you don’t imagine they’ll eventually become a lasting routine. One day you hitch a ride. Another day you wear suspenders instead of a belt. Or you invent a sister who lives in London, for example, a yoga teacher, for example, Lady Di’s personal trainer, for example, and they all fall for it because it’s easier and nicer to believe it than not believe it, and, after all, they can always use it to brighten up an after-dinner conversation with their friends.

  “The other day I picked up this guy who was hitching a ride on the outskirts of Vic and he told me an amazing story . . .”

  I must say, too, that in all these years, I’ve never been picked up by anyone famous. Friends, acquaintances, people I know by sight, yes, but the ones you see on TV or in the newspapers, no. The Barcelona taxi drivers like to recall the day they picked up the crooner, the politician, the stand-up comedian (who always grandstands, a disagreeable guy). It doesn’t work in reverse. The art of hitchhiking only lets you meet normal, ordinary folk. Or so they seem. You open the door, get superficially involved in their lives for a while, then you get out of the car, and they forget you and you forget them. That’s the theory, anyway, because reality changes the plan and puts you to the test. For instance, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone to have that feeling that you’ve just gotten into a stolen car. You realize a second too late, when you’re already in it with your seat belt fastened. He starts driving and he’s ham-fisted because he doesn’t know the car. It’s only guessing, of course, and he doesn’t tell you, but it’s happened to me two or three times. You feel trapped, you know you can’t escape, and you’d better just keep still and quiet till you get to the end of the ride. Then you go past a patrol car—stopped at a traffic light, or lying in wait in a side road—and, just before that, the stranger slows down and asks you some stock question, starts chatting, and then you understand you’re playing a role. You have to. You’re someone who’s creating a harmonious atmosphere, someone who’s cheating the math of the suspect all alone in the stolen car. Your anonymous, serene face is the dad’s, the brother-in-law’s, the colleague’s, the best buddy’s. You give a dose of normality to the scene, and he could be a terrorist, a kidnapper, or some punk thief (and God knows what’s in the trunk, you think in a moment of lucidity), and you make an effort to play the unwritten part you’ve been scripted, smiling and responding as best you can. Then, as soon as the cops are out of sight, the dense silence is back and you, relieved, are clutching your briefcase and watching the road. When you finally come into your town and he asks where you want to stop, you say anywhere’s fine, mainly so he won’t find out where you live and how you earn your living. Just in case someone turns him in and then he comes looking for you.

  So, as you see, thumbing a ride is chancing it because it leaves you at the mercy of others. Sometimes you have to amuse yourself by counting cars. The eighth one will stop, you tell yourself, convinced, and it stops. The next red car will stop, you tell yourself in despair, and it doesn’t. You have to imagine a lot of ways of passing the time if you want to stay in a good mood.

  I already mentioned the days when more women drivers picked me up than now. I really liked tha
t! Such determination to fill silences. Such relaxing rides. I wished they’d never end. Things to talk about came up effortlessly and rarely slipped into clichés—soccer or work. I never had to hide a yawn in the presence of a woman driver. And, as I also said before, I have a special face, but I’m still convinced that some women knew how to read in it the goodness of a confidant. There were some who, as soon as I got in the car, took the conversation into matters that interested them most just then, as if my mission was to bring out a train of thought, act as a mirror, or be their handball wall. I listened to grumbles about baselessly jealous husbands, consoled a girl who knew her guy was cheating on her and encouraged her to act, and tried to open the eyes and soul of a woman from my town who was about to marry a total imbecile. I don’t feel at all bad about acknowledging that I even made the day of a widow from Ripoll who must be twenty years older than me and was looking for I don’t know what, but maybe some wild adventure to shake her out of her monotony in the most novelettish way. A week later we did it again in the same roadside hideaway, but we both realized it was a one-day wonder. When she let me out in Sant Quirze, she patted my cheek with a maternal gesture and thanked me with shining eyes: she was almost lost forever, but I got her back on track with just one shake-up (her words).

  I know that this account of female rides sounds over-the-top. It must be nostalgia. Then again, I suffered once, too. Years ago, one Tuesday afternoon in Vic, I was picked up by a woman who could have changed my life but she didn’t. You know when all of a sudden you’re sure you’ve found your other half? Ten minutes, there in the car, were enough for me to see we were made for each other. Of course, it was a too-premature conclusion—the stuff of frustrated loves, as we know—but it was the first time I was in no doubt. I’ve half forgotten what we talked about—probably nothing important, though for a while afterwards I relived every second at her side, every nuance of every inflection of her voice, trying to extract useless hopes. It was raining—that I do remember—and as soon as I got in, she said she’d stopped because she felt sorry for me.

  “You looked like a wet dog out there . . .” Her tone was lighthearted. She almost seemed to be making fun of me, but there was also a hint of tenderness I’d never experienced before.

  “Woof, woof,” I said, playing along. Touching my wet ringlets, I asked, “Can I shake off the water in here?”

  “Heaven help you if you do!” she said, laughing.

  Then we got into a conversation that would have been boring for anyone else. I’m not the sort of guy who wants to set the world to rights with everything I say, and I don’t think she’s like that either. I remember one thing she said, and very naturally: the strap of a new bra was cutting into her flesh and she couldn’t wait to get home to take it off. She also asked me about the briefcase. I told her the truth and she made an amused comment, something I’d actually thought myself some time before. We laughed about it together and our laughter sounded very good. We were making music. But the important thing wasn’t what but how, the sensation that it all came from an earlier intimacy, as if someone had prepared us in a previous life, or as if that familiarity wasn’t totally new but written in our genes.

  What is it that bugs me most about the whole thing? Well, I’m not sure whether it was the same for her, even though for some months I was convinced it was.

  At the time, I was living alone. I was burning inside with the need to find someone. By my town’s standards I was getting old. Bachelor status was hovering over me. On Saturday nights I went out for beers with two friends, and we played pool at the bar. Then we did the rounds of the local discos till daybreak, but we almost always ended up having a croissant fresh from the oven at the Pavicsa bakery and going home alone. The afternoon I met that woman—I never found out her name but only noted the model and color of her car, a white Renault 5, when she was driving away down the road—all that investment in time and alcohol became pitiful, ridiculous. My excitement was so pure, it didn’t cross my mind that I’d never see her again. On the contrary, the following Tuesday, impelled by a kind of amorous superstition, I repeated the same movements at the same time, but she didn’t go past. OK, so she only does the route on Fridays, I told myself with the security of a man deciphering an easy riddle, so I repeated the same ritual on the Friday. I almost wished it would rain as it had done the previous week and, if possible, with the same drops and everything, but my lady, my stranger, didn’t come along. She never came along afterwards either. Even now, when I see a white Renault 5 approaching, my heart leaps.

  In all these years of hitchhiking, as is logical, there have been short and long waits. There are days when you just have to stick up your thumb and days when you’re at it for so long that your arm starts cramping. In the end you work out the average, and one wait makes up for another, but I remember getting quite desperate on three or four occasions. Of course, the worst time was after my brief encounter with the love of my life. The following Friday, since she didn’t come along at the same time as the previous week, I decided to wait for her. I stood back a little, a couple of steps, so the drivers could see me but wouldn’t stop. A young guy, a student, also hitchhiking, joined me, and I was terrified she’d take him and not me (then I might have done something stupid) but luckily someone soon picked him up. Bye-bye. Meanwhile I was there, patiently waiting, convinced she’d see me and stop. I’d invite her to a beer and speak clearly. An hour slipped by, two hours slipped by, three, but I didn’t lose hope. A couple of cars I know stopped, people from my town inviting me to get in, but it wasn’t her, so I made up some excuse. It got dark. The lights in the houses came on and then it was dinnertime. I morphed into a sinister shadow in the tawny glow of the streetlights. I’m sure you can imagine it. Those times when nobody picks you up and you’re left out in the cold are horrible. You brood for brooding’s sake, to pass the time, and you come to the conclusion you’re all alone in the world, the last survivor, a road Robinson Crusoe, until you’re dazzled by the headlights of an approaching car, which accelerates to forget you all the faster. Then you’re jolted back into the real world.

  At around eleven the cars started to go by more regularly, people with full bellies coming home from dinners, crazy groups out for a wild time on a Friday night. I would have been a nuisance for them, and the real traveling salesmen who were coming home after spending all day in Barcelona were too tired. In the dark, the briefcase was blacker and more threatening. Around midnight I gave up. I was a nobody, I was shattered, and for the first and only time in my life I didn’t get into any car and spent the night in Vic. Not far away, there was a pension on the Ronda Camprodon, and as I’d envisioned in anxious moments on other difficult evenings, I slunk over there that night and took a simple room like a monk’s cell. The bed, nightstand, and overlarge TV without remote control came together in a perfect setting for mortifying myself by thinking about the woman of my life. I remember almost nothing of that night in purgatory, which went by in dreams and obsessions, but I do recall that at one point I woke up, opened the drawer in the nightstand, and discovered a Bible. I was so off my head that if I’d found a loaded pistol in there, I would have shot myself on the spot.

  * * *

  I’m carrying on about these fixes you get into when you’re hitchhiking, but I don’t want to seem sneering or ungrateful. It must be said that drivers are almost always friendly and open, and before long you get into a conversation about public affairs in the region. That some or other mayor has been seen going to a whorehouse. That some farmers do what they damn well like with their liquid manure. If that restaurant in Vic has closed, well, you could see it coming. There was one—a guy called Manubens from Campdevànol—who, for almost a year, picked me up every Tuesday on the way home. After four or five times I didn’t even have to stick up my thumb. Since he always went by at the same hour, I waited in the same place, outside a stationer’s that turned into a computer shop years later, and he’d pick me up in a Ford Fiesta, I think it was. We got on
well. He was older than me and at first he was a bit cagey, but we got friendlier and friendlier with each ride. We remembered each other’s opinions, we knew how to listen, and we watched our words to avoid any areas of conflict. I remember that it was at the end of the nineties because he couldn’t stand all the bullshit about the millennium effect. He said it was just tricks of the Americans to make idiots of us and keep us under control, and for similar reasons he also ranted about cell phones. He swore he’d never have one because they turn you into a slave. (I’d like to see him now.) Another thing that got him wound up, but he kept going on about it, was killing time when you’re on sick leave and you have to stay home, fighting about everything with your wife. Manubens always wore a tracksuit, a dark green, slightly old-fashioned model, vaguely military, vaguely Brazilian, with yellow stripes down the sides. You could see he wasn’t used to it and that, deep down, he felt ridiculous, but it was a question of comfort. The second ride he told me he was doing rehab at the hospital. He was a bricklayer, and some time back he’d had a serious accident, something to do with scaffolding, though you couldn’t see any outward sign of what happened. When I asked him about it, he brushed it off with a few vague comments. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it, yet he did have a tic that gave him away. He’d quickly touch the back of his neck as if tracing the line of a scar under his thinning hair. Another day it escaped him that the matter was with the lawyers and that someone had died, a poor kid who hadn’t even seen it coming. Yeah, so you fall badly and you’re done for. Then his mouth twisted in a grimace of pain as if he was being tortured for talking too much, so I didn’t ask him about it anymore.