"Don't be mad at me, Sonya."
"Why would I be mad?"
Pedro stood in the dining room, clean shaven and dressed, peering into the kitchen, watching his wife, his coffee cup in hand.
"I have seen in the dark night over my head rain, the rays of pure light, Beauty divine," Pedro recited the lines, all the while watching his wife smiling, her head down, focusing on the dishes in the sink.
Sonya turned, and Pedro saw the young woman he had married staring back at him.
"On the shoulders of handsome women I saw wings bud ding: and rising from the rubble butterflies soaring."
"You canceled."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Your appointment. It does you so much good to talk."
"With that quack?"
"He helps you with your troubles, your memories of Mario."
"I'd rather talk to Mario."
"Dr. Otero is a nice enough young man."
"Don't be so damned euphemistic, Sonya. He's not young. He's middle-aged. And he's not nice. He sits there and never says a word. But I always know what he's thinking." Pedro looked at his wife. Sonya was an old woman again. "If you think I'm crazy, go ahead and say it."
" After what you went through, if anyone has the right to be crazy, it's you, Pedro. Why don't you tell Dr. Otero his silence upsets you?"
"I don't have time for this."
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Sonya asked, pointing at the worn leather briefcase he had left the day before on the dining room table.
Pedro walked back to pick up the briefcase before moving toward the front door.
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Sonya repeated.
Pedro looked at his wife blankly.
"Your manuscript."
"It's right here." Pedro smiled, tapping the briefcase.
Sonya pursed her lips and turned away.
"I remembered my promise," Pedro said. "It's done."
"You're lying."
"I have a few more edits."
Pedro could see the tears welling up in her eyes.
"It's done," Pedro lied again.
"I don't believe you."
"You'll see."
Sonya closed the apartment door behind him. Pedro stood near the threshold, briefcase in hand, thinking that he needed to return and make amends. Instead he started down the dark, narrow stairs, carefully minding each step. Just as he was reaching the landing, Pedro was certain he heard a familiar voice.
"Mario? Are you there, my friend?" he whispered.
An apartment door opened abruptly, and Pedro felt the bright flash of a torch in his eyes.
"You get to the generator yet? There's no power. Hey, you hear me, Professor? No power."
Pedro struggled to steady his breath, barely able to contain his displeasure at seeing Carlito, in a sleeveless undershirt and boxers, the stub of a cheap cigar between his teeth.
"The power's out," Pedro said.
"I know. Why you telling me that?" Carlito stepped closer. In the darkness of the stairwell, the smell of cigar smoke and stale perspiration nearly overpowered Pedro.
"You hear me?" Carlito asked, flashing the beam of light in Pedro's face.
"I tried," Pedro stammered, shrinking away from the beam, unable to fill his lungs with air.
"What's the matter, Professor? Too old to deliver?" Carlito laughed from his belly, scratching his head with the hand that held the cigar stub.
"The power's out," Pedro repeated.
"So you say." Carlito stepped closer to Pedro, using the stub of the cigar to punctuate his words. "Did you jiggle the gizmo? The gizmo on the generator. You didn't jiggle it, did you?"
"I did everything I could," Pedro said, reaching back to find the hand rail and nearly losing his footing on the stairs.
Carlito lunged forward to catch him, the torch dropping, sounding loudly on the terrazzo floor and going dark, but Pedro pushed away in fear, shuffling down the remaining stairs as fast as he could.
"Professor, you okay?"
Pedro didn't answer. Once out on the cobblestone sidewalk, he clung to the iron gate. He couldn't name the feeling welling up inside him, folding back like a tide, striking him, each time causing every frustration, every fear he had ever felt, to rise and choke him, to demand what he couldn't give.
"Hey, Pedro—"
"I'm fine, Carlito. Do me a favor. Tell Sonya I'll finish."
"You okay?"
"Tell her. Would you tell her? I'll finish."
Pedro released his grip on the gate and stepped onto the sidewalk, leaving behind his disappointed wife and intrusive neighbor.
C H A P T E R F O U R
"Saturnina sangrando vino
A decirnos el destino.
Girando viene, las sallas sangrosas.
Girando va, contando muertos como losas."
Saturnina watched the crowd coalesce and begin to make its way to the plaza. She felt the press of an invisible hand at her back, propelling her away from the commotion, pushing her across the city as if she must mark the hour of doom and salvation. She moved toward the trees in the square, toward the grass tamed into rectangles by the surrounding brick. She felt the tiny green teeth of each blade biting her ankles, pressing against her flesh. She watched as the blades of grass changed color— no longer green but turquoise, like the morning sky. She saw the drops of water from the predawn rain coagulating on the bricks before her, their shiny translucence unaltered by the tread of broken shoes. The trees in their prison rectangles stretched into the dome of morning sky and smiled at her, despite their sorrows, all the while plunging deeper into the earth and beyond their visible prison. She touched the dark-stained bark, rough-furrowed cloak that channeled the rain deeper into the roots, and looked up to see the massive limbs, jostled by the breeze, with each movement reframing segments of the sky.
"Dime," she whispered to the bark. Tell me. "Can you hear me?"
The cars sputtered along both sides of the avenue. The houses shrank imperceptibly into the soil, their movements glacier-like. Their faces reflected Saturnina's own: unshuttered, broken by time, entire pieces missing, and yet insistent. They held within themselves a series of histories, of those who had lived and died within those walls, and of those who had come here to imagine and then build them.
"When I stand here," Saturnina began to tell the tree, "I feel heaven. The Lord dangles me head down by the ankles. Then I stretch my arms out toward the world. He massages the soles of my aching feet and helps me through another day. He pulled