At last she smiled, a nod to my enigmatic reply. “You are being very careful with me, Carlos.” She spoke with a hint of approval. Then her gaze lifted and she turned to look at the thickening crowd of guests, some of whom were glancing our way.
“You are heroic to these people,” she said. “They can say what they wish in their milieu, however ill-considered, even idiotic.” Was it my imagination, or did she pause at this point? “And lose nothing but prestige.”
I considered this.
“They are safe, or so they believe.” She turned back to me with sudden animation. Both hands appeared, one sharply pointed towards my chest. “They see you and it overwhelms them. They wonder how brave they would be.”
I peered around at the professor women who posed, hands on hips in their long crepey skirts, and the men in summer suits or golfing shirts and slacks, and saw each face flush under my gaze. All these searching, intelligent faces were wondering, what has this man endured?
“Do anti-U.S. sentiments inform your work?” Lucía was suddenly speaking in English, and I realized we were being approached by a man I’d met earlier, an associate dean.
“Lucía is always on topic,” he said in a high-pitched voice, his smooth brow unperturbed. “The correct answer to her question is ‘yes’.”
I looked at this rotund man, his short-sleeved shirt tucked into a pair of ballooning shorts, and before I had a chance to respond, he lifted the glass from my hand and began to pour its contents onto the grass.
“Our President likes to force his latest invention down our throats,” he said. “One must resist.”
Alarmed by this revolutionary gesture, I glanced towards the President, who was prodding a sausage with a long-handled fork. He hadn’t seen a thing.
The associate dean laughed. “Don’t worry, my friend, there will be no repercussions.”
Lucía was watching me. “He’s right, Carlos. Absolutely nothing will happen.”
What a strange sensation to have your own fear snatched away, made useless.
“Now then,” the associate dean said as he replaced the emptied glass in my hand. “I already know you are the most interesting man here. But what do you make of us all?”
Lucía watched as I fumbled for English words.
“It is not interesting to be me,” I said after a moment. “Only frightening.”
He frowned and for the first time a wrinkle creased his brow. “Yes, I suppose it is,” he said gravely, then lifted his voice. “I must merge now with the members of my faculty. Play my part in the general hostilities.” His hand awkwardly touched my shoulder. “It’s been a rare pleasure, Carlos.”
When I spotted him a moment later he was standing with two women, laughing loudly as he replaced empty glasses into their waiting hands.
“Well?” Lucía called back my attention.
“Well what?”
“What do you make of us all?”
“Tell me the answer, Lucía. I am tired.”
“You’ll have to do better than that. You’re the poet, after all.”
The poet lacked imagination in so many ways.
“Why do you ask so many questions?”
She looked amused. “One is interested in the larger world.”
“An interrogation is not a conversation.”
She flinched, then said coolly, “I am sorry if there has been some offense taken.”
Hot-faced, I strode away, heading towards the bar where I’d spotted an insulated container full of local and imported beer. Perhaps Lucía had been flirting with me. It was so hard to know. I shouldn’t have spoken sharply, yet if I had to always watch each footfall, each word, how could I exist here? My character was being flattened by self-consciousness. Partly drunk, I decided to feel sorry for myself.
The President’s son reached into the cooler and pulled out a beaded bottle of lager, snapped it open, and passed it to me without a word.
Lucía was alone now, lying stretched out on a massive rock that must have been dredged from the beach a kilometre away. Her feet were bare, her eyes shut, her chest under the embroidered garment was rising and falling steadily. Clearly she was asleep, or passed out from downing too many Virtual Pions. I tiptoed past to collect my jacket. Our hostess followed me into the foyer of the house, where, touching my wrist with the tips of her cool fingers, she leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“Hasta luego.” She spoke in a low voice, and handed me my hat, a dark beret. Yet before I had a chance to pluck it from her hands she was placing it on my head, tilting it just so.
The President himself drove me home.
“Did Lucía give you the treatment?” he said as he swung the car onto my street.
“Excuse me?”
“Pepper you with questions?”
“Ah, yes.”
“One of our finest teachers, but…” He stopped the car near a hydrant and peered out the windshield.
“Yes?”
“Prickly.
No small talk.” “No small talk,” I repeated, enjoying the phrase.
“This your place?”
I had to lean forward to check the address. All the houses looked the same. “Yes.”
“Good of you to come, Carlos.”
He waited while I slid out of the passenger seat and crossed the lawn to the door of the miniature house I shared with Rashid.
One evening, Rita phoned.
“How’s it going? Getting some work done?” Her voice was calibrated to sound friendly and not too inquisitive. I wondered if it was her job as a board member to call at certain intervals.
“Everything is excellent,” I said, because I wanted her to sleep well. “And I hope that you and your son are happy.”
I could hear her breathing. “It’s prime season for bookings at the Grad Centre so I’m on the phone all day. I’m not getting anything of my own done.”
“Tomorrow I will take you out,” I told her. “Maybe for a coffee, a drink. We will talk. And you will not work for one hour!”
“Thanks,” she said, and laughed a little. “But please, let me take you.”
It was part of her job to look after me: I was another segment of the world that kept her from dancing.
The work that I was supposed to be doing, which my rescuers hoped would become a book that would sell to the multitudes, was not going well. They wanted the story of my difficulties, but all I’d managed to do was draw a map of my childhood home, with diagrams of the furniture, the piano, the leather footstool, the ornate chairs inherited from various uncles and aunts. It looked like the scene of a domestic murder. All that was missing was the blood and the outline of my own body.
I had been given an office, a tiny room high up in a concrete building. A single window overlooked an unshaded parking lot. I used to capture ants when I was a child, put them in a glass jar with sand and watch to see what sort of tunnels they would carve. But they never performed for me: they would scuffle hopelessly up the glass sides and fall backwards, then, after an hour or so, they would die.
I met Rita in a Vietnamese restaurant with steamy windows and a noisy air conditioner wedged