LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I can still spell it.”

      She choked a little as she drew on the cigarette. “Have you been treated?“ she asked.

      “Gosh no. No clinical diagnosis. Mostly I’ve learned to control it.”

      “Didn’t you say your father had dysentery?”

      “No connection, I’m sure.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “Are you headed home?” I asked. “Did you come in a car?”

      “I walked. It’s a short way.”

      “Shall I walk with you?” Always a gentleman.

      “Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

      As we reached the road she looked back for a second at the inn, as if she’d forgotten something, then to the right and the left. Irrational fear, I thought. I felt it, too, a sympathetic reaction, breathing it in with her smoke. The road was dark, no street lights. The mountains were invisible against the black sky, but I could feel their presence.

      “What causes it in your case?” I asked.

      “Who knows? Suppressed anger, I’ve been told.”

      “You suppressed it? Oops, sorry.”

      “Oh, Lord, I’ve got to apologize to Méndez. Did I make a complete fool of myself?”

      “I wouldn’t say that, but you sure kicked ass.”

      “Really bad, wasn’t it?”

      “Well, next time you could try being forthright.”

      “I shouldn’t have done it.”

      “Why did you?” I asked.

      “I had to break through all that nonsense.”

      A car passed us from behind, going slowly, its light shining on the puddles between cobblestones. Catherine dropped her head until it went by.

      “I only do it in English, by the way—get bitchy, I mean,” she said, as we walked on. “There’s something about English that gives me permission to mouth off.”

      “There’s an idea.”

      “They say speaking another language allows you to be someone else,” she added, after another minute. “Have you noticed that yourself?”

      “When I speak Spanish?” I thought about it. “I feel very young, with a child’s bravado.”

      She laughed, the good one. We got chatty, a little hyper. She began talking about people she would like to be if she were not herself. The list was long, ending with Sojourner Truth. And who, she asked finally, would I like to be?

      I mumbled about and finally said I’d settle for Oscar Peterson, since we at least had a name in common. Though, actually, I explained, come to think of it there was only one particular moment when I would like to be Oscar Peterson. It was when he was at the piano doing that thing skilled jazz artists do, letting out a line little by little, eight, twelve, twenty-four bars, more—and just when you think they are hopelessly lost, swept out to sea, crazy, absolutely suicidal and taking the whole world with them, back they come, slowly and certainly and not even out of breath.

      There was nothing original in those remarks. I wasn’t sure Catherine even heard me. We may have been talking at the same time, in fact. But then she said something that stopped me short. “Maybe Oscar Peterson has your nahual.” It was a Mayan term, an old acquaintance appearing out of nowhere on this dark road, a funny word with a gulp in the middle. “How do you know that?” I asked.

      “I think I got it first from Men of Maize. Miguel Asturias. It’s your shadow self, isn’t it, the nahual? It protects you. But it wanders. You can lose it. Sort of like losing your soul.”

      “There’s another word for that,” I said. “For losing your soul. But I can’t remember it.”

      “Susto.”

      “That’s it!”

      “A Spanish word for a Mayan idea.”

      “Trauma can do it, right? Cause your soul to fly out of your body.”

      “And if you know where it happened, you can go back and retrieve it. You stomp hard on the ground where you lost it, and maybe it will return.”

      “Or you lure it back, with music, or a drum, or the smell of tortillas, or maybe food in a bowl by the creek. Or is that your nahual?”

      My throat tightened and I stopped. Not that she noticed. She was smoking furiously, staring straight ahead of her. Who was she now? And who was I? Whatever, we were a pair, she puffing away at her cigarette with shaky hands, and me so blurred up I could hardly see where I was going.

      We walked without speaking for a few minutes. There were no other pedestrians, and only one other car, but still she was fidgety, glancing frequently over her shoulder.

      “Do you know that guy Méndez brought?” I said. “We’ve talked about him before. Elizondo.”

      “Oh, Zondo, you mean. Our paths have crossed, years ago.”

      “I thought he spoke to you. Would he recognize you?”

      “I doubt it. My hair was very short back then. I didn’t look the same.” She dropped her cigarette in the road and ground it out on a cobblestone. “The house is off here to the right.”

      We crossed and turned onto a street I had run down on numerous mornings, the house fronts joined and similar, cousins in pastels. People were gathered sociably in groups, enjoying the cool evening air. Someone was playing a chirimía, a hornpipe, and I heard the bright snaps of the claves, two sticks hit in rhythm. The music followed us and when it faded it played on in my head.

      We stopped soon at a door in a wall, hard on the street, fronted by an iron grating, a typical Antigua home. “Thank you for being decent,” Catherine said, pulling a ring of keys out of her bag.

      “Anything for a fellow panicker.”

      “This is my aunt’s place,” she explained, sorting through the keys. “My husband’s aunt, that is.”

      “Not your home?”

      “Oh no. She willed it to the Cathedral. She died three weeks ago.”

      Three weeks ago was when I’d arrived. I didn’t know what to say. “Were you close to her?”

      “Quite. She was our favorite of my husband’s whole tribe. She had emphysema and I came last month to be with her. That’s why I’m here.”

      “I,” not “we.” And “here” as opposed to “where”?

      “She was an old friend of the Méndez family. That’s how I got the job.” She opened the grating. There were three locks on the door. She inserted the keys and it swung inside with a squeak. The house was dark. If she had a husband, he wasn’t here. Nor the son either, I assumed. She snapped on an overhead light. “I’ve been helping to wrap things up for her this month, lawyers and so forth. But I’m through with it now.” She waved away a big moth, instantly drawn to the light.

      “Are you all right now?” I asked.

      “Yes. Thank you.” A phone rang inside. “I’d better get that,” she said.

      “Right. Adiós.”

      “Sí.” Another brief wave, at me or the moth, and she went in. A second light went on. I could still hear the phone. I stood there until it stopped, waited a moment more, then walked away, filled with that odd sense of incompletion. But some things just come to an end. Wasn’t I learning that?

      I had gone only two dozen steps when I heard the gate squeak, and her voice, calling softly. I walked back, unduly relieved.

      “Are you leaving Antigua tomorrow, by chance?” she asked.

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