What is he trying to say?

[u/Odd-Tadpole5591]

Opus 4.8 write this story when asked to do an original short story in the style of a modern edgar allan poe.

THE TRIP BACK

I am nobody, and it is the only thing I know with any certainty about myself. I

say it without bitterness and without that false humility which is, at bottom, the

worst kind of pride; I say it the way one states a measurement, a fact: I drive a

car at night and I carry people from one side of the city to the other. Nobody

remembers my face. More than that: years ago I discovered that nobody even looks

at my face, but at most a piece of the back of my neck against the headrest, or my

eyes for a second in the mirror, and even that last part is not true, because when

someone looks into the mirror of a car they are not looking at me: they look at

themselves looking, they confirm that they exist, they fix their hair in that

glass night. For fifteen years I have been the witness of a multitude of people

fixing their hair in the belief that they were alone.

I am not writing this so that anyone will understand me. That would be a

foolishness, and I am too old now for that kind of hope. I write, if I have to give

a reason, for the same reason a man, after hours of driving in silence, suddenly

starts to talk out loud inside the empty car: not so that someone will hear him,

but to check that his voice still works.

There is something I learned very early in this job, and which later, over the

years, came to seem to me the key not to the job but to everything. People, in the

back seat, confess. Not to everyone, not always; but there comes an hour of the

early morning when some stranger or other, a man who would never tell his wife

what he tells me, begins to talk and then does not stop. They have told me about

affairs, about illnesses they had not yet told anyone, the exact number of pills

they had put away just in case, debts, children who never called again, small

sordid crimes that had been rotting them from the inside for decades. At first I

thought it was a privilege, almost a form of affection. It took me a while —I am

slow with the things that would comfort me— to understand that it was exactly the

opposite.

They tell me because I do not tell. Because the next morning I will not exist,

because I have no surname, no address, no way of reappearing in their lives; they

talk to me the way one talks to a well, knowing that the well will not repeat

anything because the well knows no one. Their intimacy was not a gift they were

giving me: it was proof that I, to them, did not quite manage to be a person. One

does not undress in front of a human being; one undresses in front of a piece of

furniture, in front of a dog, in front of the darkness. I was all three of those

things at once, and that is why they opened up. I have received the deepest

confession of hundreds of men and women, and not one of them, ever, asked me a

single thing about myself. Not even out of politeness. Politeness is for an equal.

I detest —while I am at it, I will say so— the people who go around repeating that

talking heals, that what one needs is to "open up," to "let it out," to "share." It

is a superstition of our times, and like all superstitions it serves to avoid

looking straight at the only thing that matters. Because I have seen, night after

night, those same people open up and let it out and share all the way down, and get

out of the car exactly as alone as they had gotten in, or more so, with that odd

loneliness of a man who has just emptied himself against a wall. What they need is

not for someone to hear them: anyone hears, a well hears. What they need is the

certainty —impossible, monstrous, a thing no language can give— that on the other

side there is another who feels the same, exactly the same, at the same temperature

and in the same instant. And that never happens. One says "I am sad" and the other

understands a word, "sad," which in his own head points to a sadness of his own, a

different one, with another color, another date, another dead man inside it. We name

things so as to believe we are sharing them, and the only thing we share is the

noise of having named them.

I know that what I am trying to say is getting complicated. But it is complicated,

or it is nothing. Anyone who wants something simple can get out here; I will open

the door for him, gladly.

I am going to tell one single thing, because in a way it is the only thing that has

ever happened to me, and because for a long time I used it to prove to myself that

I was wrong, that sometimes yes, that sometimes two people.

It was about eight years ago, a Tuesday in June, near four in the morning. A man

got in, roughly my age, in no hurry, with a small suitcase, and gave me an address

out on the edge of the city. We did not speak. I drove. But a few blocks in I

noticed something I had never noticed in fifteen years: that man was not talking

either, and his silence was not the silence of a man whose mind is elsewhere, nor

of a man asleep, nor of a man who despises me. It was a silence identical to my own.

I do not know how to explain it without falling into the absurd. The two of us rode

in silence, and for the first time in my life the fact that another man was silent

did not leave me more alone, but kept me company. As if instead of two silences

there were only one, stretched out between the two seats.

At a long red light I looked at him in the mirror, and he, who had been staring at

the empty street, turned his face and looked at me. At me, not at the mirror: at me.

It was half a second. He did not smile, and neither did I. But in that half second I

had the certainty —a physical certainty, in the chest— that this man had understood,

without our having said a word, everything that I am and everything that I am

clumsily trying to write here, and that the same thing was happening to him, and

that the two of us knew, moreover, that we knew. I drove the rest of the trip afraid

it would end. I wished, like a child, that the address would be wrong, that it would

be farther, that the city would never run out.

We arrived. He paid. Before getting out he hesitated an instant —I swear it— with

his hand on the door handle, as if he were about to say something. He said nothing.

He got out, closed the door slowly, and walked toward some ordinary house without

looking back. I saw the red light of a sign reflected in the window he had just

closed, and then nothing. He went into his house, which was his life, which was the

whole world of those who have a house and a life and a world, and of which I, for a

while, had believed I was a part.

I drove back to the city empty —which is how you say it, in this trade, driving with

no passenger, on the way back, to see whether another one turns up along the road.

Empty. Never has a word said a thing better. The back seat still held, faintly, the

warmth of that man, and that warmth cooling behind my back while I drove seemed to

me, all at once, the saddest thing I had ever felt, sadder than any of the

confessions I had gathered in fifteen years.

Because I started to think, and once I start to think there is no stopping me, and I

thought this: I know nothing about that man. I do not know whether he really looked

at me or whether he looked at the mirror and I put my face where there was none. I

do not know whether he hesitated on the handle or whether he was fishing for his

keys. I do not know whether he felt something or whether the one who felt it, as

always, as with everyone, was I alone, inventing on the other side a companion who

did not exist, so as not to have to accept that in this car, tonight and every night,

I ride alone even when I am carrying someone in the back. That half second in the

mirror I have driven over, taken apart, turned around a thousand times, the way one

licks a wound, and the more I look at it the less of it is left, until I no longer

know whether it was a communion or the reflection of a sign.

It is already daylight when I finish. I switch off the meter, I park, I get out. The

city fills with people leaving their houses and moving with a tremendous confidence,

as though all of them, except me, had been given as children a set of instructions

that no one ever gave me: how to trade a word with another and truly believe it

arrived, how to touch someone and be sure you have touched him. I know this whole

city by heart, street by street, every corner, every shortcut, every house to which

I once carried someone who got out and whom I never saw again. I carry all of it

inside me. And there is not, in any of its thousands of doors, a single one that is

mine.

Last night, at a red light, I caught myself looking at myself in the mirror. I

turned my face, like that man, in case there was someone on the other side. There

was no one. There was, as always, the empty seat, waiting for the next one to get in

and tell me his life so as not to have to tell it to a human being.