They changed trains in a village from which the rails stretched on to the end of the world. A wooden coach with too many live birds. The smell of animal droppings prevailed until someone urinated in the back somewhere. The benches were crammed with women whose youth had been punished by the dust, with neutral eyes that no longer hoped for anything. You would think they had rounded up a whole generation from the desert in order to carry them to an unknown extermination. A soldier dozed on his carbine. Julieta, trying to rescue something from that wretchedness, started babbling about magical realism. Pedro asked himself when it was that this imbecile had become a good friend.

Actually, the trip had begun to smell fishy when Hilda introduced Alfredo. People who dress entirely in black tend to either withdraw to the edges of monomania or to show off recklessly. Alfredo contradicted both extremes. Everything about him eluded easy definitions: he wore a ponytail, he was a lawyer – international affairs: drug trafficking – he consumed natural drugs.

With him, the group of six was complete: Clara and Pedro, Julieta and Sergio, Hilda and Alfredo. They had dinner at a place where the crêpes seemed made of rubber. Sergio was highly critical of the flour; he was quite skilled at talking about such things. He announced that he would not take peyote; after a decade of psychotropic drugs – which included a friend throwing himself from the pyramid at Tepoztlán and four months in a hospital in San Diego – he was cured of temporary paradises:

"I’ll keep you company, but I won’t take anything."

No one was better suited than he to watch over them. Sergio was the kind of person who finds a use even for things he doesn’t know how to use, and prepares exquisite stews with weird vegetables.

Julieta, his wife, wrote plays that, according to Pedro, en-joyed immoderate success: he treated every one of her works with scorn until it had played for the three-hundredth time.

Alfredo left the table for a moment (to pay the bill, making decisions for everyone in his quiet way) and Clara moved close to Hilda, said something in her ear; they laughed a lot.

Pedro looked at Clara, who was happy to be going to the valley with her best friend, and felt the intense, sad emotion of witnessing something good that was now irretrievable: Clara’s glowing eyes no longer included him: tasting some of that old pleasure could end up hurting him. A memory wounded him with its remote happiness: Clara at the precise moment of her first encounter, open to the future and its promise, with her life still intact.

For weeks that seemed like months, Pedro had railed against going back. Wasn’t it a contradiction to repeat a rite of initiation? Did it make sense to seek the magic that they had ruined with two years of living together? Once, in another century, they had loved each other in the high desert. Where did the energy they had shared go? The naked fulfillment of those hours, perhaps the only hours during which they had existed with no consequences, with no other ties than themselves. Just this evening, in a city of numerous streets, they had argued over a broken umbrella. And it wasn’t even the rainy season! What did her complaining, the cramped apartment, the broken appliances have to do with the forsaken paradise of the desert? No, there were no second trips. Just the same, seeing Clara’s smile and her eyes like those of a child enchanted with the world, he realized that he would return. He had seldom desired her as much, although at that moment nothing would have been as difficult as being with her: Clara was somewhere else, beyond herself, on a trip that, in her own way, she had already begun.

The idea of taking a slow train won out with no opposition: pilgrims always chose the most arduous route. However, after only half a dog day, the choice seemed ill fated. It was then that Alfredo started talking about the bullet train. The look Pedro gave him reduced him to silence. Hilda bit her hails until she drew blood.

"Calm down, silly," Clara said to her.

At the next town Alfredo got off to buy juice: six oilcloth bags filled with some whitish water that everyone drank, just the same.

The earth slid by the windows, at times yellow, almost al-ways red. In the evening they saw a broken skyline, the peaks that marked the entrance to the valley. They advanced so slowly that it was an added torture to see their destination appear suspended in the distance.

The train stopped at a wretched little store constructed of sheet metal in the middle of nowhere. Two men came aboard. They carried high-powered rifles.

After half an hour – which, compared to the length of the trip, seemed like a minute – they managed to make their way through the bodies seated in the aisle and settle down next to them.

Julieta had finished her juice; the soft bag lay warm in her hands. One of the men pointed to the liquid, and spoke to Sergio:

"Wouldn’t you rather have something stronger, compadre?"

The canteen circulated from mouth to mouth. A burning mescal.

"You guys going deer hunting?" Sergio asked.

"Anything that moves," one said, and pointed to the landscape, where nothing, absolutely nothing, moved.

The sun had affected the faces of the hunters in a strange way, as though burning them in patches: their cheeks ablaze from a circulation that did not reach the rest of their faces, their necks purplish. They had almost nothing to say but seemed quite anxious to say it; they fell all over each other talking to Sergio about hunting small game; they asked if they were going camping, their gaze all the while avoiding the women.

You only had to see Hilda’s dark glasses to know they were going for peyote.

"The Huicholes don’t travel by train. They walk all the way from the coast," the hunter’s voice took on an aggressive edge.

Pedro wasn’t the only one who saw Hilda’s Walkman. Was there anything more ridiculous than those six spiritual tourists? They would surely get the worst end of that encounter on the train; nevertheless, as on so many improbable occasions, Julieta saved the situation. She blew her bangs out of her eyes and asked about the panners. One of the hunters took off his baseball cap and scratched his head.

"The people who dredge the river sand looking for gold," Julieta explained.

"There aren’t any rivers around here," said the man.

The dialogue continued, just as absurdly. Julieta was working out a scene for her next play.

The hunters were going to a canyon called "Sal si puedes."

"Right over there," they remarked, the palms of their hands vertical, their five fingers pointing who knows where.

"Take a look," they offered the telescopic sight of one of the rifles: very faraway rocks, the air vibrating in the grooved circle.

"Are there any spotted deer left?" Sergio asked.

"Almost none."

"Pumas?"

"Naw!"

What animals justified the effort of going all the way to the canyon? A couple of jackrabbits, maybe a quail.

They said goodbye just as the sun began setting.

"Here. Just in case."

Pedro had not opened his mouth. He was so surprised at being chosen to receive the gift that he couldn’t refuse. A hunting knife, with an inscription on the blade: I belong to my owner.

The sunset made up for the fatigue. A sky of intense blue that condensed into a final red stripe.

The train stopped in a hollow surrounded by the night. Alfredo recognized the stop.

There wasn’t even a corrugated tin roof for shelter in that place. They got off, feeling the painful relief of stretching their legs. A kerosene lamp waved from the engine as a signal that the train was leaving.

The night was so dense that you could only see three feet of rails in front of you. Just the same, they waited to light the lanterns: the sounds of insects, the hooting of an owl. The inert landscape they had observed all during the blazing day somehow revived them completely. In the distance, some sparks that could be fireflies. There was no moon, a sky full of fine grains of sparkling sand. They had done well after all: they were coming in through the right gate.