A Young Man's Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

subject as if by mutual agreement.
    “There are no devils.”
    “There are. The priest told me.”
    Her name, it seemed, was Maria. Certainly no great distinction among a class that numbered its Marias by thousands. And possibly because there were other, contemporary Marias in her immediate family circle, she was known as Mariquita (that is, little Maria), to distinguish her from the nebulous rest.
    “I’m going to draw your picture,” he said to her once. “You have very good teeth for a picture.”
    “Oh, yes, you,” she said, giving his shoulder a little push away.
    They were sitting on the doorstep, one on each side of the doorway, with the everlasting baby in the middle, streaking the warm sunny flagstones with little scars of dampness from time to time as its bandages brushed against them. He got up and ran in the house, and came back a minute later with a yellow pencil and a sheet of paper. He spread this flat on the ground, waved the baby vaguely aside, and leaning over until his forehead almost touched the paper, like a Mohammedan at prayer, began to trace Mariquita’s features. He never once looked up at her, apparently relying entirely upon his memory.
    Whether or not the completed effort bore any resemblance to its subject would have been a difficult matter for either one of them to determine, since Mariquita had no way of looking at herself and Blair was given no chance to compare the sketch with its original. As his pencil halted she snatched the paper from under it with a gleeful, half-shamed blare of mirth, folded it with furtive rapidity, and thrust it down her smock. It lay there for days after that. She would take it out at intervals and pretend to study it, flaunting it at him. Blair would rush at her to recapture it, but by the time the chase had ended, it had always disappeared again. Irremediably, it seemed. He twisted her hands about at times to force her to relinquish it, but made no more immediate attempt to extract it himself. Consequently he never got it. Her protégé the baby had sometimes been left yards behind during the course of these encounters, and they would return to it walking side by side but at a distance from one another, Blair sulking and she dancing triumphantly, ecstatic at having outwitted him.
    Later he began to suspect that Mariquita enjoyed the sensation of being captured and having her hands twisted rather more than the actual chase itself. For he noticed that she was a much swifter runner than he and could easily have outdistanced him on her bare feet. Yet in the end she always slackened as though breathlessly exhausted or shrank back against a wall wailing with delight. Once she pretended to have stepped on a nail or piece of glass and halted abruptly, holding her foot in both hands and hopping about in distress, with a mask of pain on her face that would have done credit to a trained actress. Blair would have given no quarter. But as his outstretched hands were in reach of her, she dropped her supposedly injured foot to the ground and darted away like a flash, leaving him only insulting laughter.
    One time she taught him how to kiss. When Blair came out of the house she was leaning against a pink plaster wall, watching a small lizard that had halted on its way up and stood dubiously regarding her, its head cocked askew. The baby was there beside her chewing the leaves of a midget vine that had escaped over the top and down to the ground from a garden on the inside. It lay sprawling contentedly in clean, powdery, beige dust, a film of which had also coated the tops of Mariquita’s feet, turning them lighter than her skin as far as the ankles. The baby was undeniably happy. So was Mariquita. The long day was just beginning for them.
    Blair approached and, picking up a stick, poked at the lizard, which immediately galvanized itself into motion and disappeared against a cocoa-colored background of baked mud that showed through a rent in the plaster. The next moment