And it is a terrible place to die, isn’t it? Out here in the badlands of northern Spain, not a soul to care or to comfort you. The airplane settles into the earth, bit by bit, and as the years turn, every trace of your existence is buried too. If my guess is correct, the man inside this French-built Potez bomber was once one of the most famous people on earth, and now he rests here in the Spanish desert, body left to rot in the sun, untended and unwept for. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I tether the mule to a withered juniper bush with a handful of oats. The wreckage is about fifty yards away, and the size of the airplane surprises me. For some reason I imagined it would be larger, but then I’m used to the behemoths of modern warfare. This airplane was obsolete almost as soon as it was built, a slow, clumsy ship nicknamed the Flying Coffin by the Spanish loyalist air force, and it seems to me that you would have to be crazy to trust your life to an airplane like that.

How whole it looks, though. How almost perfect, except for the stunted wing, the broken tail. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s the sight or sound or even idea of an airplane crash, but this one doesn’t look like a crash at all. It just looks like it came here to rest, in the shadow of a giant plateau, and never got up again. And the plateau hid it from human eyes passing above, and the desert made a fortress around it, and only my friend Velázquez remained to know that it was ever here at all.

I start forward. The cockpit windows are opaque, the blades of the propellers frozen in place. On the side of the fuselage, a door hangs ajar. The wind howls on my cheek. It’s impossible to imagine that nobody has stood here before me, that I alone have discovered this wreckage—you! at last!—but that’s what years of civil war and reprisal and misery will do. Things get left behind and forgotten, because nobody exists to remember them. The wind howls around you and covers you in drifts of sand until a single woman, bedeviled by the mystery of your fate, encounters some tiny clue, entirely by chance. Now here she stands. At last, you are remembered. You are found.