Chapter 29
I sat on a bench in the Plaza Civica. It was late October and quite cold.
I’d just dropped the children at school.
Pigeons littered the ground, cluttering the bronze statue of a man on a horse, cooing and shitting, huddling into their wings for warmth.
In my lap, the blank notebook sat unopened.
I drew my hands into the sleeves of my coat.
Another few minutes, I told myself—until what, exactly, I hadn’t articulated.
I was about to stand and go when a man at the bottom of the church steps, perhaps twenty feet from me, caught my attention.
He was bent tying his shoe. I knew him from somewhere, although I couldn’t place him.
It must, I thought, be that I’d passed him a few times in the market, or on the street.
He was unremarkable: a middle-aged man of average height and build, fair-complected, his hair graying at the temples.
San Miguel was full of people like that, people who might have been Mexican or Canadian or Spanish or Italian.
Yet I had the sense of a deeper connection, and as he rose and looked for a place to sit, I felt momentarily exposed, alone on the bench, for whatever reason hoping that he didn’t sit beside me.
It was only when he began to walk toward me that, with a start, I placed him: the man who had grabbed Louise and kissed her.
I’d never asked Louise about him and had all but forgotten his existence—or, more accurately, I’d removed him, as if he were someone I’d once dreamed of instead of a person with agency.
He took a few steps closer and our eyes met.
It was then something strange occurred. I read the shift in his face like weather: He had recognized me.
In a gesture of self-protection, I dropped my hands to my notebook.
At my signal, he jerked back, in that way some men will shrink into themselves as if suddenly ashamed of their physical power.
It made me sorry for him. I had an impulse to smile an apology.
But he had already turned and was hurriedly retreating, the pigeons flapping up noisily before him.