She got into the car and drove out of Madrid. Maybe that’s how it was. Not only refusing to take seriously messages that were probably machine-generated (Could anyone of her background, a middle-class woman down on her luck, actually doubt that?). Not only refusing to take them seriously, but also recognizing that any trace of superstition would open up a crack to a possibility that, in her case, was as remote as the existence of God. And that crack was equivalent to relinquishinng her sense of pride. If she put it down to imagination or desire, the crack could be as wide as she wanted, wide enough to generate something like, for example, the fact that she is now on the road, has passed El Escorial heading for Zarzalejo, and is taking her foot off the gas pedal because a dense fog has fallen on the foothills, limiting visibility on whole stretches of the highway. It had been a long time since she’d taken the car out with no other objective than to drive. In the past she’d done that with partners, and it was always better when they did the driving because when she wanted to let her thoughts roam free she preferred not to have to keep her eyes on the road. Setting out on a “short trip” that would “clarify many things.” Was her excursion a short trip? How far would she have to go and how long would she have to remain wherever she ended up for her wandering to constitute a short trip? And what exactly needed to be clarified? She sat near a heater in a bar in Zarzalejo, a notebook, pen, and cup of decaffeinated coffee on the table in front of her. Of course she needed to clarify many things in her life, but none of them required the urgency suggested by the clairvoyant’s message. That message alluded to problems whose resolution couldn’t be put off. For example, deciding to set up an editorial services company of her own. However, the problems she listed in her notebook weren’t of that nature; they were more long-term, vague, related to the sorts of on-going debates in which someone, perhaps she herself, would claim that it was the way things were, or a simple matter of inertia. An image came to mind: her childhood living room in semi-darkness, a television set that had been left on for hours, violent, narcotic tedium. Two people fading away in front of the screen. Then on Monday morning, after a weekend of exasperating nothingness, those two people went to work, returning with fresh air and other preoccupations that pulled them far back from the edge of the abyss and made the two hours from ten to midnight on the couch in front of the television a simple period of rest, a break before facing the world again. Some weekends they avoided the couch and got in the Volkswagen Passat to travel through other provinces, and that was a pleasant form of getting away from it all, spending time observing other realities. She, their daughter, would be in the back seat with her Walkman. Also in a world of her own.