I woke on the morning of the third day caught between embarrassment and regret. I told myself that she might still come and I tried not to feel my humiliation. I managed for almost an hour before it bloomed into rage.
As I marched down the street from my host’s house, I felt the eyes of Malasaña watching me. The stranger who had been haunting them for the past few days with no apparent agenda, now alive with outrage. Suspicions welled up in half-recognized faces. The old woman at the bodega crossed her scarred arms and shook her head at me. A girl who had offered me a sample of her father’s bean soup the night before skipped along after me, laughing at my distress. What I meant to them was changing. It would lead to hunger later, but the idea of later had abandoned me.
I went back to the blue building.
Her door looked shabbier in the daylight and my state of mind. Scratches and streaks of orange paint that I hadn’t noticed before seemed obvious now. I knocked first, shouted her name. Noises came—footsteps, the creak of a board, voices—maybe from the other side of the door, maybe from the other apartments. I pounded now, putting my shoulder into it and bruising my knuckles.
I didn’t recognize the man who opened the door. He stared at me, his jaw set, his eyes hard. White button-down shirt with stains in the armpit.
“Where’s Julia?” I said.
“Gone,” the man said. “You should go too.”
“Are you Héctor Prima?”
It landed. A flinch in the man’s eyes, like he’d suffered a little electric shock. “There’s no Héctor here. You should go.”
He tried to close the door, but I pushed in. My voice shook, and I couldn’t say whether with fear or excitement. “When is she coming back?” He shoved me, but to no effect. “I tracked Prima here. To this town. Julia said she knew him. Said she’d make the introduction if I paid her. Well, I paid her. Now I want the introduction.”
“No Héctor Prima.”
“I will go to every fucking person in this town and tell them what happened. I will stay outside your door for weeks. Months. As long as it takes.”
The man looked down, stepped back. The room on the other side of the door looked as small as my own flat. As worn and sweat-limp. I looked around for some sign of her, but found nothing. The man refused to meet my eyes, and his breath grew ragged as I looked through his rooms, or else hers.
“Where is she?”
“Gone,” he said.
“When will she be back?” I heard the rage in my own voice, and it sounded like whining.
“She won’t.”
“Why not?”
Now he looked at me straight on, eye to eye. “Because she brought you here. I kicked her out. She took your money with her. She took my money too. You can’t talk about Héctor Prima around here. If you do… if you do, it all stops.”
I sat on his couch. It squeaked and wheezed under me. “Are you him?”
“No,” the man said, then heaved a sigh. He sat on the floor, his back against the wall. With his knees up, his arms wrapped around them, he looked fragile. “But I write down what… he says. I don’t tell. And if it comes out I was doing it, he’ll stop talking to me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, even though I almost did.
The man shook his head. “Was a few years ago. The rolls had just opened, and everybody was getting used to getting payments. Starting to think maybe it would last, you know? Like it wouldn’t go away. Everybody happy, right? Because we all got money now. Only this one old dog says it’s all bullshit, or kind of. I didn’t understand, and then later, I started to. I made a point of hanging out, listening. Talking with, you know? And then… started writing it down. Posting it. Made up a name.”
“Héctor Prima.”
He nodded. “Was because it said something. Only then it got where people read it. A lot of people. Eight hundred thousand views when I put one up, and then eight million the next, yeah? And some of them are like you. I got scared. I told Julia about it, and she figured she could sell me out.”
“To someone like me,” I said.
“If it gets back what I’m doing, won’t be any Héctor Prima, because there won’t be anymore talking. So you can’t tell anyone.”
“Will you introduce me?” I asked. But I already knew the answer.
The man and I sat together in silence for a time. I felt a kinship between us, a shared heroism that outranked right or wrong. He and I both shouted against an overpowering emptiness that most people didn’t recognize. He’d lifted a betrayal of trust and privacy to the level of art. I had committed to my enthusiasm for the work past the point of being a stalker. We transgressed together, each dependent upon the other for the sense that something in our lives mattered. We were not well, but at least we were sick in company.
I sniffed back my tears and stood. His eyes tracked me as I walked to the blue door, opened it.
“Have you ever heard of the hedonic treadmill?” I asked.
“What?”
“Look it up. Maybe mention it to him. I was going to talk to him about it,” I said. And then, stepping out to the hallway, “Keep up the good work.”
At the intersection, I stopped and sat on the curb. The girl who had skipped along behind me was in the mouth of an alleyway with three other children. They were playing a game with stones and a length of twine. The old woman swept the dust of her shop into the street. The late morning sun turned the roofs of the town silver and too bright to look at for long. I couldn’t bring myself to believe how little time had passed. An hour—less than an hour—and a lifetime.
The story of my life had reached an inflection point here at the roadside in a little town far from my home. I had spent months tracking Héctor Prima, and I would never seek him out again. I would be homeless until the next disbursement came, and then I’d be hungry until I made up the cost of my train ticket home. I would suffer, but I would suffer for a reason, so the prospect wasn’t so bad.
I took out my book, turned up the contrast against the brightness of the day, and opened my folder of Prima’s work, skimming over the words without taking them in until a phrase caught my eye.
CHILDREN STILL STARVE. When I was young, we starved from poverty. Now we starve from having parents who spend their allotment on drink or drugs or pretty clothes that make them seem to have more than they do. Bad parents. Bad luck. Bad ideas. Money only ever fixes the troubles that money can fix. All the others stay on.
Yes, yes, yes, we suffer less. We suffer differently. But we still suffer over smaller things, and it distracts us. We begin to forget how precious butter and bread are. How desperate we once were to have them. Spices that meant something deep to my mother or to me? In a generation, they’ll only be tastes. They won’t mean anything more than their moment against the tongue. We should nourish our children not just with food, but with what food means. What it used to mean. We should cherish the memories of our poverty. Ghosts and bones are made to remind us to take joy in not being dead yet.
A bicycle hummed down the street, the chain clacking as it passed me. The old woman’s broom hissed against the pavement. Music played somewhere close, the bass outreaching all the other sounds. And I sat and held something precious in my hands. Something more fragile than I had guessed when I came to Malasaña. I had chosen not to break it, and as much as it had meant to me when I came, it meant more to me now. I’d come to find Héctor Prima, and I would leave without hope of coming back or guiding my fellow hunters down the track to find him.