The car was moving slowly along the black road, lost among the vast expanses of countryside that exist between the towns. Two people are traveling in the car. The man watches the road with a tired look, while the woman sinks into a heavy lethargy, keeping her consciousness only by the cold air that enters through the open window. They do not speak. Not because they can't or because they don't want to, but because speaking at that moment would be the interruption of a deeper, quieter conversation, in which they speak in a language of silence and repose.
From time to time he observes her with the limit of his pupil, making an exchange between her and the road, the road and her, not knowing for moments if the road, the destiny that his nature keeps, is the one who accompanies him while she, the woman beside him, is the destiny, the very road on which he is traveling and that will not take him anywhere. In one of these strange intrusions she notices his hidden gaze. She contemplates him, now she observes him while his gaze is again lost in the infinity of the road. She perceives the nature of those glances and sighs to herself, thinking that at some moment of that joint escape something like that would have to happen, although at the same time she knew that from the first moment, even before the glances, something was already there, that possibility of traveling together, of shortening the trip, of sharing the driving and arriving as soon as possible to the city to later get off somewhere close to non-existence, greet with the hand, thank with a low look and then disappear in the whole to only meet again in dreams or in memories.
He knows that she knows just as she guesses that he ignores it, the truth hidden in an attraction, a desire that with a little contemplation could discover the true extent of the abyss. He yawns, tired of speaking without words, so he tries to consolidate the mutual existence.
-How are you doing? -
He is surprised by her voice, not because he had not heard it before, but because he somehow thought it would not be necessary to hear it again.
-All right. I want to get there. -
An unfathomable silence appeared as punishment for the interruption of the conversation of silences. It seemed that the opportunity had been lost, so all that remained was to arrive, say goodbye, forget, not to continue trying so as not to end all possibility.
He turns on the radio to try to create the illusion of coexistence. He switches from station to station, finding nothing that fits the soundtrack of the scene on the off chance that it was all some kind of bad movie.
-Leave one, if you go on like this we'll never get there. -
He looks at it. He looks at it.
-You know, we were never going to get there anyway. -
They both smile.
Photography by Martin Canova