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the darkness of movie theaters, several times in her home in the bed she slept in with her husband, watched from the crib by the large, tranquil eyes of the child clinging to the bars to hold himself up. When my friend was discharged they agreed that she would not come to see him off on the midnight express that was to carry him back to Granada. At the last moment the woman appeared. My friend jumped from the train and as he put his arms around her felt such a surge of desire that he didn’t care if he missed the train. But he took it the next day, and they never saw each other again. “It frightens me to think what must have become of her, unstable as she was,” my friend said, his elbows propped on the bar of the Talgo diner, sitting before the coffee he still hadn’t touched and staring through the window at the desert landscape of the northern Granada province, or turning toward the slamming door that led to the other cars, as if with the impossible hope that the woman would appear all these years later.
Listening to him, I was envious, and sad too that nothing like that had ever happened to me, that I had no memories of such a woman. She smoked joints, took pills, sniffed coke, he told me, and he was afraid of all those things, but he followed her through all her strange behavior, and the more frightened he was the more he desired her. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that she ended up on heroin,” he told me. “Some mornings I wake up remembering that I’ve dreamed of her. I dream that I meet her in Madrid, or that I’m sitting on this same train and see her coming down the corridor. She was very tall, like a model, and she had curly chestnut hair and green eyes.”
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    TODAY’S TRAINS, whose seats aren’t arranged so we’re forced to sit face to face with strangers, are not conducive to travel stories. Instead, there are silent ghosts with headphones covering their ears, their eyes fixed on a video of an American film. You heard more stories in those old second-class coaches, which had the flavor of a waiting room or a room where poor families eat. During my first trip to Madrid, as I dozed on the hard, blue plastic seat, I listened in the dark to my grandfather Manuel and another passenger tell each other tales of train trips during the winters of the war. “In the battalion of assault troops I served in they marched us all up to a train in this same station and made us get on, and although they didn’t tell us where they were taking us, the rumor spread that our destination was the front along the Ebro River. My legs trembled at the thought all night, there in the dark of the closed coach. In the morning they made us get off and with no word of explanation sent us back to our usual posts. A different battalion had been dispatched in our stead, and of the eight hundred men who went no more than thirty returned. Had that train taken us to the front,” my grandfather said, “I wouldn’t be telling you this story,” and suddenly I thought, half asleep, if that journey along the Ebro hadn’t been canceled, my grandfather probably would have died and I wouldn’t have been born.
    Everything was strange that night, that rare and magical night of my first trip; it was as if when I got on the train—or earlier, when I arrived at the station—I had abandoned the everyday and entered a kingdom very much like the world of films or books: the insomniac world of travelers. Almost without leaving my home I had been nourished by stories of travels to far-off places, including the moon, the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific, the North Pole, and that enormous Russia that Jules Verne’s reporter named Claudius Bombarnac traveled through.
    As I recall, it was a June night. I was sitting on a bench on the train platform between my grandmother and grandfather, and a train, not