From Quito to Cuenca, September 4, 2018

A yellow car advances along the mountainside, above an abyss without pardon, toward the airport on its perch. From the taxi window I play the game of the fall: I imagine the wheel that skids, fails to bite and drags the mass along; I imagine the rolls down the steep slope, the white shock of nerves that know, in the euphoria of hormones and senses awake – as that bus, in Ecuador two weeks ago, plunged into a ravine, and the rock met the iron, and the iron the bones, and the bones the flesh, and all of it mingled and broke: two dozen bodies applied there their last blood.

On the other side of the chasm houses cling to the cliff, on a crust of time so fragile and so brief. Suicide paths lead to the dwellings, pickups come down them skidding, stop just in time, on this flank without trees and without roots. Inhabitants climb out of the vans (I don’t see them: I imagine them), squat silhouettes of Ecuadorian peasants, grave as rocks on the declivitous earth. Who are these people who cling to the edge of the precipice, wake in the night with caught starts, dream that they fall and perhaps will fall? They received these bad lands as a legacy, no doubt, and that is where they live, wavering on the well-curb of the world, pitching between earth and void, life and fall.

– Sí, es muy peligroso, the taxi driver tells me. A veces hay deslizamientos de tierra.

When the sleeping plane descends on Cuenca, I lean toward the porthole: the yellow lights of the city that draws itself on the ground, open loops and broken lines, smoulder in the redacted landscape. In the gap between flight and ground lodges fear, and in fear the fall, and in the fall death, en abyme to the point of panic.

Seen from the sky cities are shipwrecks in the ocean of relief. There is always some semaphore blinking, red sun screwed onto a pole, to set the cadence of distress. If the people on the ground knew all the cold and the night that surround them, they would kindle great fires on all the mountains, in all the valleys, on all the seas. Barely believable that the iron eagle, astray in the very high night, blinded by convoys of clouds, has found this city hidden in the skirts of the Andes. One glimpses streets, houses and parking lots, headlights racing along the tracings.

The plane swoops down on the relief, swift as a vertigo, and the earth rises and rises… The wheels strike the ground, the eagle bounces and the sky collapses, the black dissipates in the electric night: I walk under the neons, I wait under a streetlamp. A miniature taxi will take me to the hotel.