Blinding Light Read Online Free PDF

to make an announcement, and it might be a farewell. The far-off place was neutral ground. Steadman and Ava managed to be civil to each other, but they were through, it was over, and the other people probably sensed it. Then the others were gone, as though dissolved in the Ecuadorian air. “Good riddance,” she said, and he knew she was talking about the others.
    From the taxi window, filmed with dust and finger smears, Quito was both more orderly and more ramshackle than Steadman had expected. It depended where you looked. Off the fairly new main drag were side streets lined with hovels. Yet in the distance the hovels seemed substantial, and in the foreground the newer buildings were rundown and the gutters littered.
    Steadman inclined his head and thought, In the Third World you smile at the strangeness, then you look closely and see ruin and misery, or that something is badly broken, or that woman is ill, that child is an old man. From the lovely veranda you saw mangy dogs and a man pissing against a wall—a wall on which someone had scribbled an angry slogan in Spanish, bracketed by exclamation marks, ¡FUERA GRINGOS INVASORES! From the loveliest window you saw filthy-faced children huddled in doorways. The bottom of the heap was not far from the top, and all of it was home, turned upside down and stinking.
    â€œMi casa, por acá.
My ’ouse down there,” the taxi driver said, smiling as a street flashed past, and in that brief glimpse Steadman could see it was shallow and ruinous.
    â€œWhere is Nestor?” Steadman asked, since the driver had voluntarily spoken in English.
    â€œVeesy. He see you later.” His breath was moist with chocolate and tobacco. The man’s pungent breath had a greater reality than his words.
    â€œHe didn’t leave a message?”
    â€œYes. That is the message.”
    Though he was simple, even crude, the driver’s succinct directness in basic English made him seem intelligent.
    Steadman turned to Ava. He had felt slightly nauseated and lightheaded since the customs delay at the airport. A headache made of raw nerves tightened beneath his skull. He said, “The air’s so thin.”
    â€œWhat did you expect at ten thousand feet?”
    He expected something else. The high-altitude air was chilly, dusty with grit, and a dampness caught in his throat and scratched his eyes, like the furry air in a house of cats.
    Searching the side streets for the grimmer sights, for it seemed that truth lay at the very margins of this ride, he saw a procession, girls and women in white smocks and black veils, boys and men carrying a tottering holy figure on a litter, shoulder-high.
    â€œIs a fiesta,” the driver said, sucking candy, his tongue gummy. He was small, in a tight sweater of pilled dusty wool. Though the sky was overcast he wore sunglasses. “Is coming Todos los Santos. And Día de Difuntos. How you say fiesta in English?”
    â€œFiesta.” Steadman was staring at some masked children ahead.
    â€œHalloween,” Ava said. “They celebrate it here.”
    At the stoplight, the children approached wearing Halloween masks —cat masks, witches’ hats. Their clothes were clean, they had good teeth. Steadman had expected urchins. He rolled down the taxi window and offered a dollar to one of the masked children.
    â€œPor su máscara’’
Steadman said, lifting the mask with one hand and handing over the dollar with the other. The black satin cat mask was trimmed with black lace and seemed like an obscure intimate garment, like a cache-sexe.
    Hearing the driver’s empty squawk of mirth, Steadman reflected that in places like this, demoralized and humiliated countries, someone’s laughter seldom meant that something was funny. The driver had been disturbed, perhaps insulted, by Steadman’s boldness—the dollar, the swap, the snatch. He winced and squawked again when Steadman put on the cat