LITMIR.BIZ

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seven a few of the dreamy-eyed began to set up their stalls in the market. With long wooden poles, they hoisted hangers with made-in-China jeans and blouses, attaching them to the upper rungs of the metal mesh stalls. The market people believed the barely perceptible morning breeze contained harmful toxins, so they wore sweaters and knotted scarves at their necks.

      Around the corner, in a storefront adjacent to the market, I saw her: my patron saint. The woman who arrives earliest and sets a table to serve fresh orange juice; bananas mashed with milk, sugar, and cinnamon in a mixer; or, for the belligerently health-conscious, blended concoctions of weeds, raw beets, and quail eggs. Her wavy hair was colored dark red. She had smooth olive skin and was about my age, maybe a couple of years older. There were laugh lines beside her eyes. She wore a yellow sweater and tight nylon pants.

      “Good morning, señora,” I said, sitting on a square plastic stool.

      “Good morning, joven.” Her smile exposed strong white teeth. She didn’t call me “young man” because of my youthful appearance. Unless she knows us, all of her customers are joven or señorita or caballero. Unless and until we are friends, she is señora and I am joven. I will be joven until I am about seventy, at which point I will graduate to señor.

      “Have you any coffee?” I asked.

      “Of course.” She poured hot water from a huge percolator into a Styrofoam cup and set it before me, along with a barrel-shaped jar of Nescafé Clásico and a white plastic spoon.

      “Cream?” she asked, pointing to a blue plastic bucket full of powder. “Sugar?”

      I opened the jar of pulverized brown particles. I loved the generosity of handing over the whole bottle. If I had started to eat the Nescafé out of the jar, spoonful by spoonful, she probably would have encouraged me, like a mother feeding her baby. I dropped one heaping spoon, and then a level one for good luck, into the polystyrene. I stirred and smelled the bitter blend through the little cap of sand-colored chemical foam that formed at the top, even without the benefit of compressed “cream.” I was in heaven.

      When I was a child in Brooklyn, my father used to take the subway to Greenwich Village to the only store in all of New York that roasted its own coffee beans. He would get a special blend, three-quarters of a pound of dark French roast and a quarter of milder Colombian. That was the first coffee I drank, from the age of twelve, when my parents allowed me to mix a few drops into my milk, until later in adolescence, by which time the proportions had been reversed. As a result, I grew up to be a complete coffee snob. In Mexico City, I bought organic coffee from the highlands of Chiapas. I would order a fine grind, which I prepared in an octagonal Italian espresso pot. Any woman who spent the night with me would get a cup of that in the morning, mixed with milk I heated on top of the stove.

      But in a one-burro Mexican town, all bets were off. In some of them, you might have been able to get a cup of flavorless brown water at the local cafeteria. I would have jumped over a thousand cups of that swill to get to some Nescafé—particularly if I were handed the jar and allowed to do my own loading. After stirring in a little sugar I took that first familiarly vitriolic sip. Pure pleasure.

      “Qué rico,” I told the lady with the vibrantly painted hair.

      “Is it?” she asked through her smile. “I don’t drink coffee.”

      “Not even in the morning?”

      “Nunca de los nuncas.” She fluttered a hand by her bosom. “It gives me palpitations.”

      “To your health,” I said, raising the Styrofoam cup.

      She tilted her head, a twinkle in her eye. “What are you doing in Puroaire, joven?”

      “Just passing through,” I said. “I have some Mexican friends in el gabacho and they have relatives around here.” She looked at me as if she expected more. “It’s beautiful—the hills.” I always tried to change the subject as quickly as possible. For discretion’s sake, I never trumpeted to locals that I was around to help one of their neighbors’ kids who was facing death row in East Buttfuck, Kentucky. What’s more, explaining what I did for a living involved taking a deep breath and expending a lot of wind.

      “It’s pretty quiet in Puroaire,” she said. With a long wooden stick, she stirred sugar, corn flour, and water in a pot to make a breakfast drink called atole.

      “That’s not what they say.”

      “What do they say?” she asked, a smile on her face.

      “You know. That there are a lot of conflicts. That it can be dangerous.” I seldom referred directly to drug trafficking. That was supposed to be one of my strategies to sneak quietly into old age.

      She smirked. “Take a look around. Do you feel threatened here?”

      “No. Last night I took a walk and there were old people and kids all around the plaza.”

      “That’s the way it is,” she said.

      “Good morning, Doña Inés,” said a woman in her early twenties, skinny with long eyelashes and protruding teeth. She joined the older woman behind the table, removed her jacket, and put on an apron. “Sorry I’m late. Panchito has colic,” she said.

      “Don’t worry,” said Inés, stirring the atole. Her young assistant began to slice oranges in half. The morning light glimmered off the freshly cut flesh.

      “I went to Cucaramácara last night to see the Los Dandys concert,” said Inés. “And you know what? They didn’t even show up.”

      “Don’t tell me!”

      “It took me an hour to get there. They had to give everybody their money back.”

      “How rude!” The assistant began to place each orange half in a hand-operated contraption that squeezed out the juice, half by half. Mexicans refer to their true love as their media naranja—their other half of the split orange.

      I sipped my Nescafé and enjoyed the slight breeze. Within an hour, the air would stop moving in Tierra Caliente, and the temperature and humidity would squeeze us all in an oppressive embrace. I would be trying to get Esperanza’s siblings to tell me heinous, painful, and humiliating secrets about their mother and father. But meanwhile, savoring the coffee in the market, listening to the women gossip, and watching the vendors set up their stalls, I was happy.

      One of my virtues was that I didn’t have to become miserable in order to ruefully recall that in the distant past I had been content. When I felt good, it was tangible, palpable—I could hold the feeling in my hand. My work was demanding and intense, but it was full of what I came to think of as “stolen moments.” These were the instants when somehow, despite the desolation and misery that I was documenting, I recognized a feeling of serenity, or even joy. I noticed them all the time. When I ate or drank something that tasted good, when I felt the reprieve of a breeze against my skin, when I saw a breathtaking landscape, or when a pretty waitress turned her head to give me a second look. I enjoyed a free hour to walk around the broken-down houses and unpaved streets of an unfamiliar town. When I told people about my work, they tended to assume that it overwhelmed me with sadness. On the contrary. Being so close to other people’s tragedies that I could kiss them was a constant reminder of how fortunate I was.

      “You don’t even know Los Dandys,” said Inés to her assistant. “Your generation doesn’t listen to those songs.” She smiled, closed her eyes, and began to sway her hips. “You are like a precious stone, a divine jewel, truly valuable,” she trilled, her arms posed as if she were dancing with a lover. “If my eyes don’t lie, if my eyes don’t deceive me, your beauty is without equal....” She stopped abruptly and laughed, and, although facing her helper, she glanced at me from the corner of her eye.

      “Gema” was Inés’s siren song. Maybe she was my media naranja. I could marry her, settle down in Puroaire, and get all the Nescafé I could drink. I looked at the curve of her neck, still

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