Cover

Dedication

To the women and men who took to the skies in their frail machines and gave their lives to make human air travel an everyday miracle

Epigraph

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

—Albert Camus

Bardenas Reales, Spain

January 1947

The airplane lies in the shadow of a plateau, half-buried in sand and scrub. It sits at an angle, so the right wing slants upward against the sky while the left wing sinks into the ground. The dull green fuselage is mostly intact but the tail has broken off. Only the ghost of its original paint—the red, yellow, and midnight purple of the Spanish Republic—has survived a decade of relentless white sun.

I dismount. The mule jerks his head. Possibly he senses my nerves; possibly he senses something else. When you come upon a wreckage like this, undisturbed for ten years, known only to God, you approach it like you might approach a graveyard.

The question is, what bones lie inside?

According to the map, my mule and I have traveled about eight miles west of the town of Valtierra in southern Navarre, in the middle of what they call the badlands. The landscape is dry and yellow-brown, a junkyard of plateaus and gullies, lone hills and dry streambeds, carved by wind and by occasional, catastrophic water. In summer, the heat would singe the hairs from your neck, and the dry air would suck the sweat from your skin. On this January afternoon, the weather is equally arid but cold. I took care to bundle myself in a wool coat, in scarf and gloves and one of those caps with flaps that come down to cover your ears. I don’t do well in the cold, you see; my blood requires sunshine to stay warm.

Not a single living creature exists around me. Only a few wisps of vegetation rise from the soil. It’s the kind of loneliness that sinks into your bones, that makes you feel as if you’re the only person left alive in the world. If I still harbored any hope that the pilot of this airplane might have survived this crash, might have escaped and made his way to safety—and maybe I did, because the human heart will go on nourishing these ideas, no matter how farfetched—that hope is now gone. This bleak territory could no more support life than could a tennis ball.