After rather feebly, she thought, pointing her finger at the door and watching, through half-closed eyes, Harry and Solange make their way through it, Doña Eulalia took a deep breath, reached for the teapot, and, suddenly aware, in the way that these things came to her, that her night was not yet over, drank directly from its spout, then asked herself aloud what situation she would have the opportunity to mishandle next, and, still aloud, whether she ought not to go and get one of the lampshades from the reception hall downstairs, put it on her head, roll back her eyeballs and hum, though in the event she had so little time to wait that were she to have acted on this self-mocking impulse she would barely have made it halfway down the back stairs before the second round of visitors appeared, as it was, the chill that preceded them, as they stood waiting on the other side of the main door to her bedroom, after having gotten into the house she certainly didn’t know how, was such that she reached for one of her woolen throws and pulled it up to her chin before taking another deep voice and calling out that the door was open,
“Of course it is,” said one of the three old men she found standing in front of her a moment later,
“It’s always open, your door, isn’t it?” said another,
“It all just drifts right in, kind of like a walkie-talkie without an off switch, although maybe the reception isn’t so good,” said the third,
“Won’t you gentlemen sit down,” said Doña Eulalia, folding her arms around herself and crossing her ankles, “You will forgive me if I don’t stand,”
“Oh sure we’ll forgive you,”
“We just love to forgive,”
“But we won’t sit, standing seeming preferable,”
“Keeping the blood flowing,”
“Through our old bones,”
“Are you cold, Doña Eulalia, you look cold if you don’t mind my saying so …”
“You three brought a chill in with you,”
“Which we don’t always do,”
“Sometimes we bring in the opposite,”
“Light up the night, heat up the party,”
Doña Eulalia looked from one to the other of them and saw nothing except old men with watery eyes wearing sweaters and windbreakers,
“Your powers fail you,”
“You draw a blank,”
“Gaze upon the void,”
“It would not, gentlemen, be the first time,”
“Or the last, right?”
“How can I help the three of you?”
“Oh you’ve already helped us,”
“We’re grateful,”
“Here to express our gratitude,”
“We brought you a token,”
“Some chocolate,”
“Easily edible water fowl,”
“Custom made,”
“Just marvelous,”
“It’s about Harry,” said Doña Eulalia, looking, without moving, at the ribbon-wrapped box one of her visitors was holding, “Or perhaps it’s about his friend,”
“For someone so chilled you’re awfully warm,”
“Or it’s about my Ireneo, you’re the ones who gave him a fright, earlier today,”
“Your Ireneo, I like that, it has a nice ring,”
“We just told him it wasn’t worth going looking for those shoes,”
“That he had better things to do,”
“We helped him,”
“Who are you?”
“Who are we?”
“I love it,”
“You tell us,”
“I see,” said Doña Eulalia, still looking at the box, which was now sitting next to her teapot, its cargo of what looked like chocolate ducklings on clear display through its plastic top,
“It’s going to get colder tonight,”
“A turn in the weather,”
“Drink tea and eat chocolate, it will keep you toasty,”
“That’s what they do in the Amazon,”
“Something like that,”
“When they get a fever,”
“Or take fright,”
“Being as it never really gets cold there,”
“Anyway, we won’t keep you,”
“We just stopped by to deliver the token,”
“The mark of our gratitude,”
“Have one,”
“I should have warned them, poor dears,”
“Oh, you’ve warned them,”
“You’ve been marvelous,”
“Now you deserve a rest, a good sleep,”
“Have a chocolate, they’re excellent,”
“I don’t think so,” said Doña Eulalia,
“But we do,” said one of the old men,
“Yes, we certainly do,” said one of the others,
“We certainly fucking do.”
III
In the places
only the dead dream, I will look for our reflections.
That night something like a wind left over from deepest winter made its way through the city, banging shutters, frosting balconies, flattening exposed strips of grass, crisping flowers, scattering wadded paper and ice cream wrappers and freshly discarded metal cans, and making the people who were still out, everywhere — their eyes scanning the heavily mitigated darkness for directional cues that would simultaneously lead them further into adventure and help them avoid disaster — wrap goose-pimpled arms around themselves and reach for coats they weren’t even sure they could have found if they were at home, and while it would be maudlin to propose a direct connection between that wind — which among many other things simultaneously rekindled then extinguished the end of the perambulating Raimon’s real cigar and froze the tips and knuckles of his strange hands, smashed the hat off the balding and unusually delicate head of Almundo, of Almundo’s Store for Living Statues, as he closed up for the night, and elicited an extraordinarily general and multilingual polyphony of “What the Fucks”—and Doña Eulalia’s message, it would be needlessly artificial not to pause for a moment in the insistent face of it and let it stretch its serpentine fingers through the groaning city, through its parks and plazas, its courtyards and late-night kiosks, before returning to Harry — an earlier incarnation thereof — reading the paper a lifetime ago on a stone terrace that looked out over an immense caldera whose rippling waters sparked and glittered in an afternoon light so ferocious it seemed to him, as he told Solange long after they had left Doña Eulalia’s, when his voice had finally returned, an exact inverse of the icy howling that had kept them up half the night under inadequate covers, one that would sear his flesh, char his bones, and leave nothing behind but a few black crumbs for the young waiter to sweep up, which was really neither here nor there, because, he said, what he had thought of in particular when Doña Eulalia had made her pronouncement then, politely but firmly, told them to leave without asking any questions because they would not, because they could not, be answered, was not of the temperature, but rather of the palm reader, festooned with purple and turquoise scarves, as well as some kind of Kung Fu jacket, who had been working her way from table to table across the terrace until, inevitably, she had appeared before him and none-too-politely demanded his hand, which he had surprised himself by removing from the top left corner of the paper and offering to her, though without quite looking away from the article he was perusing as he did this — which, he told Solange, had been meant to indicate a measure of disinterest in or even disdain for the proceedings — but before his disdain had had a chance to fully unfurl, the palm reader had given out a shriek, flung his hand away, and moved off so quickly that she was gone before he could take his eyes off the paper, and because his eyes were more or less there anyway, and the thought of someone looking at his hand and shrieking was unsettling, he had continued to pretend to read, until, after not too terribly long, he had been able to actually continue reading and enjoying the view of the caldera, if not the infernal heat, and then his time alone had ended and the others had joined him, and while in the ensuing avalanche of activity he had stopped thinking about the palm reader and her reaction to his palm, that night he had seen her billowing scarves and Kung Fu jacket and heard her shriek over and over again and then, less than a year later, well …