Best of all is night in a foreign country. Come sunset you leave some place because it’s turned out to be hopelessly boring, and you set out, let’s say, due south. Darkness is descending onto the plains, covering up their melancholy, and by ten in the evening you’re driving through pure black space. You can imagine all sorts of things to yourself; you can guess at the outline of the unseen landscape, the fields, orchards, the towns of white stone, the churches and squares cooling after the heat that lasted all day; you can try and come to terms with the perverse abundance of matter, the pornographic immodesty of history, which is lying on its back beyond every curve and over every hill; but ultimately it all turns out to be futile, because we remain alone with the space, which is the oldest of all things.

Road No. 4, road No. 1, road No. 13; red and white lights, lines on the asphalt stretching into infinity, mirages in the side mirrors, a glare that dissolves in the hot black air, intersections, green signs with place names, beltways and viaducts, tangles of asphalt ribbons around the beating hearts of cities, strings of trucks like vast railroad trains trailing skeins of foul-smelling shadow, demented will-o’-the-wisps in the fast lane going a hundred, a hundred-ten miles an hour, as if they were trying to drive all the way through the center of the night and reach the sunrise while others are still traveling in the dark . . . Yes indeed, the extreme solitude of the highway, where for hours on end you don’t see a single living soul, only condensations of humanity with its obsessive need to be in motion and to get the better of infinity. Nothing but two-dimensional profiles, barely corporeal blurs behind the windshield, holding lit cigarettes or picking their noses. Unless you happen on a gas station, where everyone looks either like a weary potential victim or a restless sneak thief, while the immense blind bodies of long-haul trucks resemble huge boulders against the dark blue sky.

That’s right, best of all is night in a foreign country on the highway, because at those times foreignness extends across the entire earth and sweeps everyone up indiscriminately in its flow. Somewhere on the horizon are the fires of human settlements, indistinguishable from the distant glimmer of the stars. Oh, the flickering artery of nothingness, oh, the recollection of ancient times when we were homeless in the world, when space was terrifying in its immensity. Now it irks us with its elusiveness.

After four hours I gave up. I couldn’t be bothered to read the map. I took the first exit that came along and followed a narrow snaking road down into a tree-filled valley. Up above, the six-lane highway was raised on gigantic concrete piers. Headlights crisscrossed the sky, and a monotonous rumble drifted down like heavy dust. A few minutes later everything had vanished and fallen silent. I was driving through a forest. From time to time I passed buildings. They were dark. Everyone was asleep. I had no idea where I was. In the middle of the wooded wilderness I spotted a lone house with a lighted driveway. It was a bar. A thickset man in a white apron and a chef’s hat was watching TV. In the semi-darkness the freshly washed floor shone; the legs of upturned chairs poked toward the ceiling. There were no customers. I asked for a glass of wine. He turned a silver-colored tap and poured without measuring. He said that unfortunately he couldn’t offer anything to eat, that the kitchen was closed, but he could make me a sandwich. I didn’t feel like eating. I explained that I wanted more wine. He found an empty liter bottle behind the bar and asked if that was enough. I nodded. He smiled and turned the tap again.

Half an hour later I drove off the road onto a track through the woods; I found a patch of grass, climbed into my sleeping bag, and after three mouthfuls of wine I fell asleep.

In the morning I set off in search of coffee. I passed isolated houses lost amid the green hills. Eventually I came to a town. Across from the café was a gas station. The three pumps stood right on the sidewalk. Four elderly men were sitting among them. They’d brought chairs from somewhere and were just sitting there. They were warming themselves in the morning sun, immobile as lizards. They were all smoking. Or rather, the cigarettes were burning down of their own accord in the men’s hands. Columns of ash grew and then fell to the ground. Every so often a scooter would pull up and then one of the men would rise, pour gas, and take the money. I caught the mixed smell of gasoline and tobacco smoke. They were observing the street in silence, from under lowered eyelids. They didn’t speak to one another, because they’d already seen everything in life and there was nothing to talk about. As the sun moved across the sky, the shadow cast by the overhang of the roof gradually approached their feet. This was their place and they knew that before the day heated up they would already be safe in a patch of coolness.

Afterwards I walked past them. From where they sat they could see over the roofs of the houses to the gray piers of the highway embedded in the dark green of the hills three or four miles away.