The clerk looked at me significantly. “If this Antonio Dias is your father,” he said, “then my guess is, he’s still in Alicante.”
And so I made my plans to go. I renewed my passport, then waited in my hotel room for it to arrive. During that time I watched no television nor read a book. I wrote no letters nor read any that I received. I didn’t want to be distracted. As the days passed, I sank deeper into my own closed world. I no longer nodded to people on the street. I didn’t answer when they spoke to me. The days passed, and my world grew smaller. At last, I shrank into a small, dark seed.
The passport arrived, and I bought a ticket to Madrid. From there, I took a bus to Alicante.
It was nearly midnight when I arrived. A foreigner, with no knowledge of the language, I took the first hotel room I could find and stretched out on the small, narrow bed to await the morning. Through the night, I thought of my father, of how near I sensed he was. I tried to imagine his face webbed in dark wrinkles, the sound of his voice as it spoke in a foreign language. But he remained as elusive as always, still as remote and towering as he had been the day he’d stood on the veranda and silenced all of us with nothing more commanding than his gaze.
I awoke very early, just after first light. Across from my bed, I could see a small sink, a wrinkled towel that hung limply from its bare metal rack, and a battered armoire. They didn’t look the same as in my escapist dream, however. Nothing was the same. Outside my window, where light blue, rather than white, curtains lifted languidly in the warm morning breeze, there were no tiled roofs or dark spires. There was only a sprawling modern town gathered around a much older one.
It was still early when I left the hotel. Across the street was a large market, decked with bright-colored vegetables and row upon row of sleek, silvery fish. Pointing first to one thing, then another, I bought a piece of bread and a cup of coffee, eating as I continued on my way.
I’d written the address to which the last Rodger and Windsor had been sent on a piece of paper, and for nearly an hour after leaving the market, I moved from person to person, showing each the address, then following an array of hand signals, since I could not understand what was said to me. Block by block, turn by turn, I closed in on my father, moving deeper and deeper into the old Moorish quarter of the city. Perched on a high hill, a huge fortress loomed above me, its massive yellow walls glowing in the sun.
At last I found the street I’d been looking for. Madre de Dios it was called, Mother of God. It curled near the center of a warren of other narrow, nearly identical streets, and at its far end, half hidden in the shadows, I saw a sign. It was carelessly painted, and hung at an angle, the way I knew he would have painted and hung it. It read BICICLETAS.
I approached the store slowly, with a sensation of shrinking, of returning to the size of a little boy. I felt as I had felt that night I’d gone down the basement stairs, hesitant, unsure, eerily afraid of the man who stood behind the large black wheel.
And so, once I reached the shop, I found that I couldn’t go in. Through a single, dusty window, I could see a figure moving in its dim interior, moving as he had moved, haphazardly from place to place, but I could not approach it. Each time my hand moved toward the door, it was seized by a terrible trembling, as if I expected the shotgun still to be cradled in his arms.
After a moment, I turned abruptly and walked across the street, standing rigidly, unable to move, while a stream of men and women, some with children at their sides, casually went in and out, ringing the little bell he’d hung above the door.
There was a small, dusty plaza just up from the store, a place of scrubby trees and cement benches. I went there and continued to watch the entrance of the shop. As the hours passed, I remained in place, my back pressed up against the spindly gray trunk of an olive tree. To the right, a gathering of women, their faces hung in black scarves, talked idly while young children scrambled playfully at their feet. At the far end of the square, old men in black berets tossed wooden balls across a dusty court, their faces shaded beneath a canopy of palms.
Time crawled by, minute by minute. The sun rose, then began to lower.
While I waited, I imagined it again.
I imagined following him as he made his way out of the little bicycle shop. Using the landscape that now surrounded me, I saw him trudge along the deserted street, winding uphill toward the ancient fortress, its gigantic walls glowing yellow above him, striking and unreal. I imagined stalking him steadily as he crossed the little plaza, his feet shuffling cautiously over the rubble of its broken walkway. I saw myself close in upon him as he turned into a narrow, nearly unlighted alleyway, passed under a low, crumbling balcony, and disappeared behind its veil of hanging flowers. It was there I saw myself sweep in behind him, rushing beneath the balcony, the two of us suddenly gathered together behind the dense curtain. I heard myself say, “Father,” then watch as he turned toward me. I knew that I would give him time to turn, time for him to see me, time for his body to stiffen as the word continued to echo in his mind, as he wondered hopelessly, and with a wrenching sense of terror, if it could be true.
Then and only then, I would strike, raising the blade above his trembling, horror-stricken face. This is for Laura,” I would tell him as I delivered the first blow. “And this is for Peter and Marie.”
For the next hour or so, I continued to luxuriate in my father’s murder, reliving it again and again, rejoicing in his agony, while the sun sank farther toward the sea, and still, he did not come out. By then the other shops had closed, their owners marching off to the nearest tavern to while away the remainder of the afternoon, while my father remained inside his shop. I’d seen the door of my father’s shop close, as well, then a hand draw down a curtain, but nothing more. At first, I imagined him still inside, perhaps piddling with his latest Rodger and Windsor. But as the hours passed, a graver thought occurred to me. Perhaps he had escaped again. In my mind, I saw him crawling out a dusty window, then trotting down a narrow alley to where a small boat waited for him, bobbing lightly in a peaceful sea.
For a moment, I felt a great terror sweep over me, the fear not only that he’d escaped again, but that he’d escaped from me, as if, from the beginning, from that first flight into the rain, that had been his one true aim.
I stood up and peered out toward the shop, my eyes squinting against the still-bright sun, and almost at that instant the hand appeared again, and the curtain rose.
With the afternoon siesta over, customers began to come and go again. There were not many of them, as I noticed, but then my father had never been one to attract a steady clientele.
The light began to change with the final waning of the afternoon, darkening steadily until the first blue haze of evening descended upon the street. At last, the first lights began to shine from the shop windows that lined the narrow, winding route of Madre de Dios.
It was already full night when those lights began to blink off again. The one that shined beneath the tilted sign for BICICLETAS finally blinked off, too.
Seconds later, I saw him back out of the shop, pulling the door closed behind him, then turn slowly to face the plaza. A streetlight cast a silver veil over him, and in its light I could see that he was dressed like the other old men of the region, in a dark suit, with a faded white shirt that looked slightly frayed at the collar, and no tie.