This Must Be the Place (50 page)

Rosalind shifts her socked feet so that they are both curled against her water bottle, which the American father filled with boiling water and wrapped in a towel (an old Scout trick, he said, giving her a wink that could almost be said to border, disconcertingly, on flirtatious). The air temperature is a marvel: Rosalind can see her breath condensing before her as she lies there, arms crossed over her chest, like a church tomb effigy. It was scorching all day and then, by evening, the chill descended and took hold. She can feel, already, the effects of the altitude. A slight slowing of the body’s movement, a pressure on the forehead, an urge to take deeper breaths. They had, the driver said, to expect symptoms to get worse tomorrow.

The truck had climbed and climbed. Oh, the things they had seen! Rosalind feels herself tremble with the pleasure of it all. They had passed lakes of startling, unreal cerulean (‘It’s the minerals,’ the scientist boy had explained, squinting through binoculars), geysers belching sulphurous steam, flocks of cerise flamingos, fastidiously high-stepping through the algae. Such things! Rosalind wants to hoard each and every one in her mind, placing them carefully on a shelf to be looked at, marvelled over in the days and weeks and months to come.

Which is possibly why sleep is eluding her. She is tired, down to her bones, soaked right through, like a rag, with exhaustion but she is simultaneously filled with an effervescent glee, an irrepressible thrill. She is doing this, she is really doing it: everyone said she was crazy, she was out of her mind. Her friends in Santiago and her sister over the phone from London exclaimed in horror when she told them she was leaving Lionel and going travelling, on her own, for two months, maybe three, or perhaps even close to a year. She would be mugged, she would be murdered, she should come back home to England, she must have taken leave of her senses, it must be the shock, she must get Lionel to apologise, was it really worth throwing away a good marriage, she shouldn’t rock the boat, she must let things lie, she mustn’t do anything in haste.

But the haste, it seemed, had appealed to her, for once. She who had never done anything without careful, detailed consideration; she who had taken eight weeks to decide whether or not she wanted to accept Lionel’s offer of marriage; she who took days and several visits to a shop before she could commit to buying a new dress. She had packed a single portmanteau, she had extracted her passport from the bureau where all her and Lionel’s documents were kept – their marriage certificate, their visas, their vaccination cards, their insurance – she had tipped the servants, embracing some of them, she had written Lionel a note, three sentences in total, and off she went.

With a trumpetty-trump, Rosalind thinks and has to press a hand over her mouth so as not to let out a giggle.

A movement on the other side of the hut makes her turn her head. One of the Americans is sitting up, unzipping his sleeping-bag. The father. Rosalind sees him, through the thick dark, putting on his glasses, riffling through his pockets, his pack. Is it another passport panic? Is he always to be losing things? She is about to call to him, to ask him, would he like her to switch on her torch, when she hears the crackle of something like foil or plastic, and sees him stumbling for the door.

He pushes aside the sacking, ducks down through the door frame and is swallowed by the gloom.

After a moment, Rosalind unzips her own sleeping-bag, swings out her legs and follows him.

The cold outside is static, polar. There is no wind and the thinnest of frosts gilds the ground. The coin of a moon dangles low in a punctured, glittering sky. The sight of it arrests Rosalind on the threshold. She looks up and up. It is the biggest sky she has ever seen, dark lapis in colour, so big that it feels almost possible to discern the curvature of the earth beneath it.

‘Quite something, huh?’

The American is a little way off, in the lee of the outhouse wall. She can see his outline, the jut of his profile, the fiery tip of a cigarette, moving up towards his mouth, moving down. It reminds her of a satellite, circling in its own lonely orbit.

‘It is indeed,’ she says.

‘Niall says,’ the man begins, blowing out a lungful of smoke; it drifts into Rosalind’s face, ‘that this place is the purest on earth. You can believe it, can’t you, when you see it like this?’

She has to struggle not to cough; she has never tolerated smoke well. ‘Purest in what sense?’

‘Something to do with the elements. Chemical elements. They are the purest you can find, because this place was under a sea that was cut off in prehistoric times. So the sodium, the lithium, the magnesium here is …’

‘Unadulterated?’

‘Exactly.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m probably explaining it badly. You’d have to ask Niall.’

‘I might,’ she says, ‘if I didn’t worry that his answer might be somewhat over my head.’

The man nods. ‘There’s always that danger. Niall is a man of few words and those he does say are mostly incomprehensible.’

‘Was he always like that? A child genius?’

He takes another draw of his cigarette. ‘He was, I guess. But to me, he’s always been just himself.’

‘Unadulterated,’ she says, and he turns towards her and she can feel that he is smiling.

‘Exactly. Niall is the Salar de Uyuni of the human race.’ He is still looking at her, tugging the earflaps of his hat further down. ‘So, tell me, Rosalind,’ he says, ‘what’s your story?’

‘My story?’

He shrugs. ‘What brings you here? I mean, you have a perfect right to be here, of course, but you’re hardly the average backpacker. You’re, what, sixty years old?’

‘Sixty-eight.’

‘Sixty-eight! Your accent is straight off the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel, you’re all the way out in South America, alone, you speak perfect Spanish. I’m intrigued. What are you doing here?’

She decides to deliberately misunderstand him. ‘Talking to you.’

There is a pause. The man – Daniel, he is called, she now remembers, he’d told her earlier today – looks at her, then away.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘We can carry on talking about elements and prehistory, if you like.’

Rosalind nods. ‘That would be preferable.’

He begins yet another of his searches through his pockets. First the side pockets, then the chest, then the inside ones, then the ones in his trousers.

‘Do you ever think,’ Rosalind asks, ‘you’d be better buying clothes with fewer pockets?’

Daniel laughs, properly, and for the first time. ‘My wife says that.’ He then amends this to, ‘My ex-wife.’

‘Well, the woman has a point. It’s merely a question of probability,’ she continues. ‘If you limited yourself to one or two pockets, you would avoid this matter of constantly misplacing—’

‘Aha!’ He cuts across her, triumphantly holding aloft a small bottle. ‘You see? Not too many pockets at all.’

He proceeds to shake out a pill from the bottle and gulp it down, without water.

‘I don’t suppose you could spare me one of those?’ Rosalind asks.

‘One of these?’ He seems amused. ‘Are you in the habit of asking strange men for prescription medication?’

‘No, I—’

‘Do you even know what they are?’

‘I assumed they were sleeping pills but—’

He shakes his head. ‘These aren’t sleeping pills.’

‘Oh.’

‘They’re—’ and he says a word she doesn’t recognise.

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘Then you have led an upright life in the company of decent people.’ He gives her a pained, abashed glance through the dark. ‘They’re for alcoholics. They make you violently ill if you so much as touch a drink.’

‘I see,’ Rosalind says. She turns her head from left to right. ‘And you’re worried about running into a bar around here?’

He recaps the bottle and pushes it into one of his pockets, buttoning down the flap. ‘No, it’s not that. I’ve made a promise – to Niall and my wife, ex-wife, I should say – to take one every day.’ He waves a hand through the air. ‘Niall lived with her for a while there and the two of them got together and formulated this plan. If I take them, she’ll let me see the kids and Niall will let me live with him. If I don’t, I’m out on my ear. No place to live, no contact with the children.’

‘That sounds rather harsh.’

‘Harsh but fair. The signature stamp of my spouse. Former spouse.’

‘She seems to be a woman of strong opinions.’

‘You, Rosalind, have hit the nail on the head. She also has the annoying habit of being right, most of the time.’ He shifts from foot to foot, hands deep in his pockets, then says, in an altered, expressionless voice, ‘She kicked me out, you see, three years ago. I don’t blame her. I was not in a good state and kids shouldn’t grow up around that. I’m doing the Twelve Steps now. For my sins.’

‘How are you finding it?’

‘Terrible,’ he says cheerfully. ‘I hate it. It’s a toxic mixture of pious and dull. And the people you meet are so … I don’t know … monomaniacal. There’s no one more joyless than a drinkless drunk.’

‘What step are you on?’

‘Two.’ He grins at her. ‘It’s the third time I’ve done it. Niall calls them the Thirty-six Steps. So maybe I should take the optimistic view and say I’m on step twenty-six.’

Rosalind shivers. The cold has crept up on her, sliding its fingers along her skin.

‘Come on,’ he says, noticing. ‘We should get some sleep. May I escort you back to the penthouse suite?’

‘You may,’ she says, and takes the proffered arm.

Daniel insists that Rosalind sit in the front seat, next to the driver. When she demurs, he divests her of her coat and her small bag and stows them in the footwell, so she really has no choice other than to climb in with them. It is, she learns, as soon as they set off, the most comfortable place in the truck. Which isn’t saying much but there is a modicum more padding here than in the back and she can see the whole wide vista of the windscreen.

In the back, the Swiss couple bicker in their seesawing language; Niall sits with a notebook open on his lap, marking something down in it; his father sits beside him, eyes hidden behind dark glasses.

Rosalind attempts to engage the driver in some small-talk but doesn’t get very far. He is called Carlos, he lives in Potosí and has four children. And that, it seems, is that. Carlos, Rosalind would venture to guess, is not a man who derives a great deal of satisfaction from his job.

They reach the saltpan by midday.

Rosalind must have been dozing because she comes to in a place so dazzlingly light that, for a moment, she cannot see. She had been dreaming of the veranda that adjoined her house in Santiago: the succulents with symmetrical faces, bedded in gravel, the spike-fingered yuccas, the moist-petalled orchids perspiring in their mossy peat.

She wakes with a small cry. She knows this because she hears it reverberating in her ears. She sits herself straight, clears her throat, clutches at the bag on her lap, avoids the eye of those around her. Will they have heard her? What would they make of it? Will they say anything?

Then she stops thinking these thoughts. She stops thinking anything at all.

The world around her is startling, unaccountable. While she has been sleeping, the truck has pulled into a place like no other. She has never seen anything like it before.

The windows are filled with a relentless, merciless magnesium-white glare. She has to hold her hands over her eyes and open her fingers just a crack. Her neck and forehead throb with a bright, sharp pain – either the altitude or the retinal shock.

Everyone in the truck is silent, motionless. Nobody speaks.

When she is able to remove her hands, she sees that the oblong of the windscreen is bisected by a thin, hazy, bichromial line: blue meets white. That is all. Salt topped by sky. Pure, twinned colour.

Someone in the seats behind lets out a low whistle and this seems to break the spell. The door is clicked open and there is the sound of footsteps, of scrambling, of exclamations.

Rosalind gathers up her hat, puts on her sunglasses and releases the catch to her door. Her boots crunch as she steps down. She looks at the white at micro-level: minute crystals of salt. She turns around: white, white, white, salt, salt, salt, as far as her sight will stretch.

She turns 360 degrees, her hand shading her eyes. It is, she thinks, quite unbelievable. Her eye searches for an irregularity, a seam, a trick, a flaw, but there is none. Salt reaches up to meet the horizon and then there is a cloudless expanse of sky. Blue matched by white, one reflecting off the other.

The effect is somehow celestial. It is as if she has woken in the afterlife and heaven is a place of purity, clarity and two colours. And completely, unutterably empty.

Or not quite. Some way off are the tiny pegs of figures. She can hear the fetch and fall of voices. The Swiss couple are photographing each other. Rosalind watches, impassive, as the boy sheds his clothing, his equipment bouncing up and down as he struggles with his last remaining sock. The girl’s laughter rolls along the salt towards her, like a bright, shining ball.

‘I hope he’s got sunblock on that.’

Rosalind turns to see the scientist beside her. He is dishevelled in a misbuttoned shirt, a blue hat, sunglasses and a cream so thick it renders his face a ghastly pallid hue.

‘Shall we ask him?’ Rosalind says, watching as the Swiss boy performs naked cartwheels, his girlfriend running after him with the camera.

The scientist, Niall, pulls a face. ‘No, thanks.’ He turns his attention to some monitor that he’s carrying. ‘He needs to be careful, though. This place has the most intense level of ultra-violet light anywhere in the world.’

‘Does it?’ Rosalind asks and, aware that he’ll know the answer, says, ‘Why?’ She never shirks the opportunity to gain knowledge, to add a fact to her store.

‘Because the rays come from above,’ Niall points up, ‘and reflect back off that.’ He points to the glistening white ground, flat as a mirror. ‘You know anywhere else in the world where you need to apply sunblock to the underside of your chin?’

With that, he walks off, leaving Rosalind alone. She reaches for her camera, Lionel’s camera, raises it to her eye. She turns the lens left, she turns it right, scrolling over the landscape. She positions the horizon line halfway up the viewfinder, she shifts it down. Then she lets her hands fall. She replaces the lens cap.