It was one of those bus terminals where it didn’t seem possible that any bus would ever arrive, much less leave. Geno had taken a table in the middle of a deserted bar, and neither waiters nor managers appeared. The counter also remained vacant.

In the window of the kiosk, adjacent to the bar, past season sweets, melted chocolates, moldy candies were charred. Flies dominated the placeas in the aftermath of a silent war.

gene went to the furthest point that could be reached by bus. A stagnant job, a fruitless love, a predictable fate had ended. But for this it would be necessary to break in a micro.

The clock of the bar, the only one in the station, above the counter, on an ocher and acre-colored wall, proudly displayed his immobile needles. Geno also didn’t have a watch with him. He had arrived in that country by night train, and he had crossed the road that separated him from the bus station.

The last time the train guard had told him the time, it was 3 in the morning. I knew his bus was leaving at 6. But that was all I knew. He was completely unaware of the present hour.

Suddenly, behind the counter, he arrived a beautiful woman of incalculable age. Although the temperature in that dingy bar was counterintuitive – a cold humidity as well as an irritating heat – the female movement altered Geno’s perception of the body. The woman was wearing a flowing dress and when she started scrubbing the ant, her pads brightened the air.

– What will be served? he asked.

“Coffee,” Geno replied.

The hitherto post-apocalyptic environment has changed into a newly discovered type of life. Man and woman, even in that impossible space, still bet without looking for it: inside a game with unknown rules and an uncertain outcomebut terrible.

Geno sensed that if the manager, from whom he had just ordered a coffee, correctly applied his female pout, a word, a kiss, it could be perfectly stranded to old age in that lost corner from the hand of God. It was just a question of not clinging, for any reason, to his possibilities as a man.

– Do you know if the six o’clock bus comes? Geno tried. I really wanted a clue.

The woman, he wasn’t sure, shrugged. And she turned on the radio. After an advertisement for the unusual pineapple juice, weather announcements and greetings to the public (they didn’t give the time), began a radio drama: The unknown woman.

Like the unsuspected dynamic the woman had imprinted on that dead place, the radio drama caught Geno’s attention. A boy swung from town to town, and there he had to decide between a love and his vocation, whether to continue as assistant to the coroner, he was his teacher; Or become a police officer.

His beloved, a Foundation employee, wanted him to be a police officer. They should contribute to a happy country, in her opinion. The young man’s dilemma was exciting for Geno as a listener. Minute by minute the fiction had progressively co-opted his senses. What would Ezekiel decide? But then, just at the turning point, an unsigned bus arrived. What if it’s the six o’clock one?

– Do you know if it’s the six o’clock one? he asked the woman.

He shrugged again, but this time he smiled.

– Could you please listen to this part? Geno asked the woman, referring to the radio show. Please listen to what Ezequiel replies. I ask the driver and I’ll be back.

The driver reluctantly informed him that the bus was not the six o’clock one. Geno almost ran back to his table. His bag had remained unscathed on the chair, the cold coffee, Ezequiel had already said the thing about him. The woman is not. An anguish like a child invaded Geno’s chest: he felt a pathetic desire to cry, which embarrassed him as if he had lost his identity as his.

What could my hands have done with it? The Expósito tango whispered, what could they have done to him, to leave so much pain in my chest. But it was not the history of humanity: only of weak men like him or like Ezekiel. He drank the remaining coffee, stole a croissant and left enough money on the table.

The driver of the six o’clock bus got out and yelled his way into the empty terminal. Geno embarked, eager to learn that plot point in the radio drama and the woman’s ultimate fate. Where would he go? Would he have listened to Ezekiel’s resolution?

Already during the trip, he tried to deduce Ezequiel’s choice. On the radio of the micro, the presenters have dismissed the chapter of the date, the last. gene asked the driver if he knew the ending, the man said no. With that refusal he fell asleep.

At one of the stops, several hours later, he got out to buy something to eat. The bus left without him: with his bag and his documents. After a few moments of despair, he found that he could really start over. be another It was unexpectedly easy to get a new identity.

It was first employed in a hardware store. Then bike racks. He later dated a co-owner of a restaurant. And finally he was the owner of the restaurant. He made it the most important site in that ghost town. Travelers stopped there not very clear traders and the casts that visited other cities; even lovers on the run.

Geno has never forgotten the radio theater or the woman at the counter. He knew the truth. How that episode in Ezequiel’s invented life had unfolded. In that option was a solution to the riddle of his own life, a clue, an encrypted and definitive message.

Miracles are often hidden in irrelevant situations: one night the author of the radio drama, Víctor Aldún, walked into Geno’s restaurant, El Vigía, along with a troupe of actors. Someone mentioned his name, Aldún’s, when the screenwriter was already completely drunk. Not to have clarified a set designer who was the creator The unknown womanGeno probably wouldn’t have known.

He calmed his expansiveness, so as not to seem crazy or frighten him, and asked him, as cautiously as he could, what Ezequiel’s mistake had been.

– I have no fucking idea, boy – Aldún replied, even though Geno was already a true gentleman. I believe that part was written … (and muttered a name, one of his boyfriends at the time).

Thirty years had passed when Geno returned, casually as the first time, to that desolate bar at the six o’clock bus station, to the silent and evanescent woman behind the counter, and to the truncated radio theater. She was there and she was an old woman. The terminal was back to normal, the desserts were contemporary, and the coffee machine gave off a legitimate aroma.

“All my life I have been waiting for you to come back,” he said. I was wrong.

It would have all been like this …

– Have you heard of Ezequiel? he asked, as if they had known each other all their lives and that afternoon was that morning, that night or whatever it would be.

She shook her head no.

– I also met the screenwriter – the woman revealed, as if in that statement she spoke of a whole lineage of loves, consisting only in not giving oneself to Geno-. But she couldn’t tell me.

Geno smiled sadly. The next bus, with a sign and on time, left at six.

wd