Clearly Now, the Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

and dump myself onto the last seat in the back.
    Soft lamentations, directed at no one in particular, come from sticky vinyl seats,
Ay, Dios mio, este calor . . . insoportable sol, coño
. . .
    Indeed, it is a freak weather pattern that brings this heat suddenly blazing. There are many children: over a dozen of the blue-shirted, pleat-skirted schoolkids on their way back to class after lunch. Two black girls with sweet voices play a singing game behind me. Through the window I see a blade of a woman in a white linen dress bargaining hard for a block of cheese and a barefoot child trying to catch an older one on a bicycle.
    I put my attention on the
Harper’s
article I’m reading, a scathing review of Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Among other abuses, prisoners are often coerced to participate in the annual rodeo, which usually wraps up with maiming and even deaths.
    The slowing of the Gray Buffalo
,
and the rustle of bodies, tears me from the article. An adolescent mestiza is suddenly leaning over me to peer out the window, the scent of her humid flesh in my nostrils, her black curls swing cool against my cheek. From the front of the bus, whispered prayers and exclamations unfold, seat by seat. The cause of our delay appears outside my window. A man has been run down. He is dead—or else seconds from it. His head is mostly severed and he has literally been knocked out of his shoes. He is fairly young. His face holds a contorted expression that could be delighted surprise. The driver stands curbside next to his damaged car. He crosses his arms and rocks a little on his heels; he nibbles a cuticle. He holds an awkward smile on his face, a look of profound embarrassment.
    When the horror registers, I turn away like waking from a nightmare. The cleavage of the mestiza is still pressed against me as she cranes her neck to catch the longest glimpse possible. I can hear her pulse.
    All of the children are clambering around, squirming between appendages. They are transfixed, like they might be at a magician’s trickery or a cartoon. The older people shake their heads and grimace. The crowd reorganizes itself, “Ave Marias”
and other benedictions rising from the seats, the motion of the sign of the cross.
    I go back to the article. The story is well written but inconclusive; a Justice Department investigation is pending at Angola.
    When we reach downtown, I enter the current of midday and find myself on shaky legs. I quiver under the eave of a bar. A breeze brings a scrap of newspaper to rest against my leg, a headline and most of an article:
La Violencia Surge (Violence Rises)
. Instead of my errands, I find myself in a dark corner of the bar, pouring Polar beer through my nerves.
    This is some of what I learn in her letters from the Old World, a composite of the spring of 1998:
    Big, soft DJ headphones cover and warm her ears; sweet, sad music that makes her a little bit more okay pumps softly through them. A long wool jacket wraps her torso and she loosens it a bit as she goes, pulling up the hood—the better to slink through the throngs of men with hungry eyes. She’s been too proud to betray any fear, but on the inside the violence of their stares has cut at her and she wants someone on some mornings, someone it’s okay to be scared with, to hold her tenderly, someone to dab away her quiet tears with a steady hand. But now she is all right; she is walking, twilight a silvery promise on the horizon. For a while she puts her eyes on the ground as she walks, in that way she has, just the same as pulling up her hood—to take her a little bit further from the bandstand of the world.
This old Paris is okay
, she thinks, the wine and the coffee mixing in her veins, her face pleasantly cold against all the warmth under her jacket. When she emerges from the narrow streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood, she suddenly knows exactly where she is: beside the Seine, a block from Shakespeare