II
AUTOMATIC ENGINE
1.
‘I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss.’
(‘House Taken Over’ by Julio Cortázar, tr. Paul Blackburn)
I hope I haven’t wasted this quotation by using it now.
2.
Then we woke up.
She smiled.
We got out of the car and stood leaning against the bonnet. Eating the last of our supplies – half a packet of biscuits, 3 peaches and the water – we decided that the prison sign was deterrent enough. We wouldn’t go on.
The sun was low and the long shadow of the car met ours out across the vast scrubland. I saw in this projection, in this combination of our shadows and that of the car, a cat’s head. We wondered what our cat might have been doing in that moment.
While she, sitting on the bonnet, ate the last biscuit, I put the key in the ignition; the needle on the petrol gauge swung to just past the reserve tank. I turned the engine on. At the sound of the exhaust a number of small birds shot up out of the bushes, lurching a little way through the air, like they had ballast in their feet, before landing once more. I revved the engine a little to warm it. She, still outside the car, hiked up her skirt, took off her knickers and took another pair out of the back. She flung the used ones away and they caught on the tapestry of the bushes, where we left them hanging.
3.
We made our way along now-familiar roads, and after 3 hours came to the main road. A Shell garage soon appeared. We filled the tank and had some breakfast in the cafeteria, decaf coffees, croissants and some very strangely branded mineral water. We sat at a table by the door and watched a large number of trucks drive by. Freezer trucks, trucks transporting lumber and sand, others transporting we didn’t know what, and still others transporting things we would never have imagined could be transported: an entire three-storey brick building drifted past at one point. She wondered aloud if the people who lived in it were inside.
Nocilla Lab Page 4