Austral by Carlos Fonseca

He has never been in a desert before, but he has imagined them often.

That's why every time he looks at the postcard he now holds in his hands, his first instinct is to see in it a portrait of the arid plain. Little does it matter that the photograph is in black and white. He imagines the tons of sand, the atmosphere of tedium, the feeling of emptiness. It seems there is no-one in the image, just a dozen lines meticulously arranged that he suddenly transforms into the empty streets of an old mining town.

He sees the white drifts at the edges of the postcard and tells himself they are clouds. But then he starts to doubt. On a closer look the white splotches lose their lightness and start to resemble heaps of salt. Just like that, the desert becomes a giant salt flat....


Only in that moment, when his imagination is exhausted, does he remind himself of what he knows: this is just a photograph of a dirty window, and where he'd thought he'd seen a desert landscape, a salt flat, or the moon, there is only dust.

Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell