Afterwards, Harry realized that he had more than once walked past her, that she had been hidden in plain sight, like the letter in the famous Edgar Allan Poe story, which mechanism had baffled all attempts to find it because it lay out in the open where everyone could see it and so, in the natural order of things, didn’t, a comparison he liked quite a good deal even though the two ends didn’t quite match up — she after all had neither been hidden nor was hiding — and which prompted him, some weeks later, when it was all over, to seek out the story in question and reread it over a plate of sliced quince and tuna wedges and a glass of sparkling water at a small specialty shop near the market, out of which he had emerged when he stepped onto the broad sloping central pedestrian boulevard that split the city and led down to the sea, and which he had walked along nearly every day, remarking, assuredly, upon the numerous “living statues” who had set up their more or less elaborate shop along the edges, to the general delight of tourists and to the more specific delight, as Harry was unfortunately to learn, of certain local connoisseurs, though never before having stopped in front of one, as he did shortly after starting down the street on this day, in front of this extraordinary silver angel, with her enormous silver wings and beautiful silver face, down one cheek of which coursed frozen, silver tears, upon which Harry gazed with wonder then sudden, spine-stiffening recognition that grabbed him up and shoved him through to the front of the small crowd surrounding her, whose members were snapping pictures and remarking on the elaborateness of her costume, really one of the best, so much more marvelous than the fairly predictable Che Guevara, or the chubby Julius Caesar, or the man with his own head on a plate, or the creaky, battling robots, or the lady dressed as a fruit stand: this was on a par with the golden centaur, or the two platinum men on bicycles, a real work of art, Yes, a work of art, thought Harry, who stood on the sidewalk no more than three feet away from the silver box the angel seemed bolted to and gazed up into her hardly blinking eyes, which did not move even when she very precisely arched her back, then lifted a shoulder, then twisted her arm, and after a few minutes he was asked by several of the onlookers to step aside, there were pictures to be taken, he was blocking the full view, in short, “What the fuck, man?” but Harry did not move, kept gazing up into her eyes, even as the murmuring around him grew louder, less relaxed, until suddenly it struck him that she was, perhaps because of him, on the verge of breaking her silence, that by standing there and somewhat impudently staring at her, he was committing a transgression, interfering with her act, possibly even making her nervous, which was exactly the opposite of his intent: he had thought long and hard on this, the two of them with their broken faces could eat together, share a drink, take a stroll, apply tape and glue to each other, but now he could see that the situation would require much more than a casual “Hi, they thought I was you,” and that his standing in front of her, in all her splendor, like a troll lying in ambush beneath a handsome bridge, was no way to get things started, so he bowed his head and, with the idea of in some way mitigating the disturbance he had caused, murmured an apology then backed away slowly, rather ridiculously, before turning and moving off down the boulevard, where eventually he passed Julius Caesar, then a rather good Atlas with golden dreadlocks, who had set down his globe and was sweeping the ground in front of his box, and then Che Guevara, who had a plastic cigar stuffed in his mouth and was engaged in lighting and throwing tiny firecrackers onto the ground.
Cheeks burning as he hurried away, Harry reminded himself that, in his defense, he had stumbled upon the silver angel by accident, and that while it was true that this accident had occurred in the context of his attempts to locate her, it was still an accident, that could not be disputed, or could it? hmmm …: he had been looking for her and had found her, and hadn’t his method been more or less to stagger around the city until their paths crossed again? and hadn’t that been what had happened? it had, but, still, in what sense had he, actually, been looking for her? wasn’t he mistaking what had been reduced to rather a wan hope, one stripped of all but the most desultory agency, with active engagement? wouldn’t any outside, so-called impartial observer briefed on the situation exclaim, “but you weren’t looking for her, you were just flopping around, you may have been thinking about her in some abstract way as you went out, but that’s pretty far from constituting a search”? but what constitutes a search? Harry wondered, what is the cut-off point? the point beyond which the activity ceases to be what we have mistaken it for? once, over coffee, a well-meaning friend had put her hand on his shoulder and said, “what are you doing? that was years ago, years and years …” and he had taken a sip of his coffee and said, “I’m searching”—in much the same tone, he realized as he passed a pair of living tree statues, fairly nice ones, that he had used in making his comment to the pigeon about beginning his “assault on life” and his comment to the man under the awning about the number of hurdles life lines up before you — but what, exactly, had he meant by that? had he been describing an open-ended engagement, one that, perhaps, continued even now? this seemed plausible, and rather interesting, insofar as said search could be seen as an umbrella for the search he had or had not been conducting for the woman he had or had not found, but which was it? had he, in this subsidiary instance, been searching or hadn’t he? could he, in other words, fairly attribute a portion of his boorish behavior in front of the angel to his astonishment at having found — rather than stumbled across — her? and what (the fuck, he thought) was the difference? it was hard to say, which was the way so many of his arguments with himself ended: in depressing stalemates, he far and away preferred losing to himself, as at least in those instances he achieved some approximation of clarity, and clarity, even the false variety, was inarguably something, etc., Harry thought, and as he did so, moving all the way down the long avenue and toward the water, the handsome woman, the woman with paint on her face, the silver angel — whose name, it is time for her to have one, was Solange — stood on her box, and thought not about Harry, whom she had barely noticed and had quickly forgotten, but about a path lit by star- and moonlight, one she had heard the dead were obliged to travel before leaving this sphere, and that for some was very long and for others very short, and she wanted to know which, in the case of her lost one, it was, and not knowing was troubling her and preventing her, and her lost one, she suspected, from moving on, which was why when, a week ago, after she had found the little salmon-colored slip of paper on the subway platform that guaranteed answers to “insoluble questions,” she had telephoned the number given and had been told to wait at the café where we first encountered her and where Ireneo made his mistake.
For his part, Ireneo, who had quickly shrugged off any sense of guilt about having brought Harry along to the “answer session” at his employer’s apartment, due to the inherent, not to mention typical, vagaries of his brief—“Bring me the one with the broken face”—had in fact been tasked with finding the woman, but quickly realizing what to Harry would seem so problematic — that only serendipity would bring him back into contact with her, who in arranging to be present at the café at the given hour had communicated neither name nor number — he had done exactly nothing besides keep his turquoise eyes open as he went about his business, which in the vicinity of the moment we have lately been considering, had him lighting candles for the dead at a church no more than a quarter mile away from where Solange stood unhappy, unmoving, on her silver box, and less than that from the living tree statues that Harry passed on his way down the boulevard, a relative proximity that all three of them, had they known, would in the light of their later association have found bracing, Ireneo no less than Harry and Solange, still, what is most pertinent at the moment is that among the seventeen red candles Ireneo had been tasked with lighting by his employer Doña Eulalia — the old woman who had spoken to Harry while intending to speak to Solange — three related to the former and one to the latter, and as soon as they were lit, this very Doña Eulalia, who was sitting quite some distance away on a small red sofa by the window of her bedroom, felt a sharp urge to sit up straight and take a deep breath and insert a mint-lemon drop into her mouth, only the last of which she did, while thinking, “I should have spoken to him while he was here, and now where is he, and more importantly, who are they? for even though something had come across authoritatively enough to her in the days following Harry’s unexpected appearance for her to expand the list of souls she was actively tracking, she didn’t know who the candles that corresponded to Harry were, any more than she knew who the single candle was that corresponded to Solange, though there were things of course that she could say about them: saying things, however imprecise, about the souls corresponding to the candles she was forever sending Ireneo off to light was her business, though there were times — like now as she sat on the sofa sucking on her mint-lemon drop wishing she could tell Ireneo where, for example, to find both Harry and Solange, which would simplify things considerably — she wished she were better at it,