“Israel. That’s very far away.”
“I’ll only be there a month.”
A vague emotion possessed the colonel, a nondescript sadness that seemed attached to no specific thing, but to all things, like weather blown in from the sea.
“They’re paging me. I have to go,” Margery said. “But we’ll get together. I’ll come visit you. I promise.”
“I know,” said the colonel.
The day before he was released, the colonel hired a man to transfer his belongings to Tomas’s room behind the Drive-In Puerto Rico, and the next morning, dressed in civilian clothes, going slowly with his cane, having to stop every couple of minutes to restore his equilibrium and catch his breath, he walked down to the beach and sat on the deck of the restaurant, watching the placid sea. Inside the break the water was the color of aquamarine; beyond it, a dark lapis lazuli. Gulls skied against the blue heavens, and confections of white cloud, bubbled like meringue, moved leisurely west to east along the horizon. Combers plumed at the seaward end of Punta Manabique. The glorious peace of the day overwhelmed the colonel. He rested his head in his hands, his mind flocked with things half felt and half remembered, with shades of sorrow, bright spikes of relief. Tears filled his eyes. He wiped them away and, steadier, he unlocked the corrugated metal door, rolled it up, and stepped into the restaurant.
The place had been cleaned, the bar stools washed free of blood and set in a neat row, and there was a note from Tomas’s girl, who signed herself Incarnacion, giving her telephone number and saying that she would be ready to work whenever he needed her. But it was the rear wall that held the colonel’s notice—the mural was missing. Gone. The lime green background color did not appear to have been painted over, but the volcanoes and cruise ships and Carbonell’s face and the gray airplane, they were all gone… except for the image of an indigo lizard high in the left-hand corner. The colonel was unclear about many things, but he was certain the image of the lizard had previously occupied the lower right-hand corner of the wall. He did not find this dissonance as disturbing as once he might. It seemed that by way of compensation for his lack of clarity concerning his personal life, he was now able to grasp some of what Tomas had told him over the years and, though he could not have articulated it at the time, he recognized a strange circularity in the events that had led to his ownership of the restaurant.
He switched on the generator to cool the beer, made coffee, and taking a cup, returned to the deck. In the verge of the palms, hummingbirds blurred the air above a hibiscus bush; the breeze wafted steam from his cup. A lapidary fineness of well-being settled about the colonel, as if land and sea and air had conformed to his physical shape and emotional configuration, and he thought of what Tomas had said about finding a place you knew was yours. It did not escape him that the old man might have known more than he had claimed about the world and magic, that he might have anticipated their fates, and may even have had a hand in directing them. Nor did the colonel fail to acknowledge the significance of the vanished mural, the blank wall that had been left for him, perhaps, to fill with his own images. Once he would have sought to explain this away, to debunk any less than traditionally rational explanation; but now he wanted to understand it, and he realized that in order to do so he would first have to accept the uniqueness of the circumstance.
Approaching from the direction of the colonel’s hotel, a man drew near and ascended the steps of the deck. Young, dark with the blood of the Miskitia; carrying a lieutenant’s dress jacket and hat. “Is it too early?” he asked.
“I have coffee,” said the colonel. “And some pastries… though they may be stale. This is my first day. I’ve had no time to organize.”
“Bueno… cafe.” The young man sat at a table removed by two from the colonel. He leaned against the railing and let his head fall back. The strain that had been apparent in his face dissolved. “Dios! The sun feels good.”
“Would you mind serving yourself?” The colonel indicated his bad knee. “I have an injury.”
The young man went inside and poured a coffee. On his return, after a moment’s hesitation, he sat on the bench opposite the colonel. He offered a friendly smile, blew steam from his cup. His mustache had not grown in fully, like the mustache of a pubescent boy, yet lines of stress tiered his brow and his eyes seemed worn, like dark coins from which the symbols of the realm had been effaced.
“What brings you out so early?” the colonel asked.
“I couldn’t sleep in my hotel. It’s all the reporters, the officials. They keep me awake half the night, and afterward I can’t sleep.”
“Reporters? Are you famous?”
“No, I… no. I’m only doing some appearances. Publicity for the army. They tell me I’ll be back with my unit in a month or two.”
“That’s not so long.”
“You have no idea how long a single day with these people can last.”
“I can imagine,” said the colonel. “Surely there must be some benefit attendant to these appearances.”
“The girls.” The young man smiled shyly. “That part of it’s all right.”
The colonel laughed, then introduced himself as Mauricio.
“Mucho gusto,” said the young man. “Jaime.”
They began to speak of other matters. The weather, the fishing, the quality of the national soccer team, the girls of Puerto Morada. And though the colonel suspected that the young man was his country’s latest hero, perhaps the next in a curious tradition of heroes whose lives were somehow connected to this stretch of beach with its hummingbirds, lizards, and wandering cows, he did not invest the notion with much thought and immersed himself in the conversation.
The sun climbed higher; warmth cored the colonel’s bones. The sky paled to an eggshell blue, the swells beyond the break grew heavier. A shadow glided through the water near Punta Manabique. He could not tell if it was a manta ray, but the shadow was itself validation of a kind, implying that beneath the surface of things there was always a beautiful monster waiting to rise.
“Do you think there are places that know us?” he asked the young man, and in asking the question, he felt the presence of Tomas, felt his old friend’s amiable yet pointed inquisitiveness occupying his flesh like a perfume, then drifting on, but leaving its trace. “It is a common enough question to ask if one knows such and such a place. ‘Do you know Fuengirola? Do you know Roatan?’ But do they have a sense of us? I wonder. Does their vitality affect us in ways we cannot conceive?”
The young man looked puzzled. “Are you implying that we are acted upon by the ground beneath our feet? I don’t believe it. Our fates are not controlled by mysterious forces. A man carries his fate with him.”
“That was not precisely my implication. But I must say I’m not so certain of things as you appear to be. I am beginning to believe there are places made for us in this world, and if we find them, we may understand patterns in our lives, in all life, that are immune to straightforward analysis.”
A tall black woman in a red blouse and a denim skirt emerged from the sea grape beside the restaurant, bearing atop her head a bowl covered by a white cloth, and began walking along the beach toward the town, establishing a human comparative to the swaying of the palms—this graceful juxtaposition of man and nature caused the colonel to contrast his generally dismaying impression of the world with his impression of it now.
“This place, for instance,” he said. “I have only been here a short time, but already I know a few things I did not know before.”