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baseball mitt. Loved to drink. He wore a baby blue linen jacket every day of the year. He had two or three of them, identically wrinkled, and a white Mexican shirt that he kept unbuttoned almost to the waist. He reminded me of the retired history teacher in
The Catcher in the Rye.
Except it was endearing, it was tender, it was adorable, this old blade with a bony chest insisting he was still in the game.
    â€œAnd he
was.
Once a month, Freddie took the bus to Mexico City, hired the prettiest boy he could find in the red light district. He paid well, never got beaten up and came back the following Monday with a light step and interested in everything. I
adored
him.
    â€œFreddie knew everybody in San Miguel, and he liked knowing everyone. He got me a ground floor sublet, with an old piano somebody had left behind, a patio and a view of the mountains. When someone asked me where I lived, I’d say, ‘
Callejón de los Muertos.’
The Street of Dead Lanterns. I loved how it rolled off my tongue. Three weeks after my arrival, Freddie threw a party for me.
    â€œThe events that day haven’t lost a drop of colour. They’re vivid the way the world looks when you suddenly surface after swimming underwater. I must have been paying a certain kind of attention. Why, I don’t know. Unless you believe that stuff. I’ve been over these details a million times. Because if I had done anything differently, if I had taken
this
street instead of
that
street, if I’d lingered over the lines in the fruit stall a few moments longer, then what happened would not have happened. It’s like watching
Romeo and Juliet
: even though you know the story backwards, you keep hoping that
this
time the Friar will get the letter to Romeo.
    â€œI took a morning sketch class at the Institute. We were drawing a bare-breasted Mexican girl with a beauty spot on her right shoulder. She had a gap between her front teeth and you could see by the way she smiled that she was shy about it. After the class, some of the students, mostly women, stayed on to talk to the instructor, a Frenchman who smoked Gauloises through an absurdly long cigarette filter. But I had things to do. I bought fruit for the party in the
mercado
and then I met Jan Trober for a coffee at the Cucaracha. She was a New York actress who had settled in San Miguel after the bottom fell out of her career and her husband left her. We sat at a table on the sidewalk so we could see all the people in the town square. The boys walking in a circle one way, girls walking in a circle the other; everybody eyeing each other. Beautiful in its way, the way life works like that.”
    The candle sputtered and went out. We sat in the silence and the darkness. After a while, I said, “Shall I light another candle?”
    â€œNo, let’s just sit here like this for a while.”
    In the hallway, voices speaking an Indian dialect passed by the door. It’s going to be dark in here tomorrow night, I thought. And for a few nights afterwards; and everything will be different. You assume things are going to be a certain way afterwards, and then you find out, like Macbeth did, that they’re not. Preposterously not. The act, or its after-burn rather,
becomes
who you are.
    How could I have been so naive?
    â€œIn Mexico, up in the mountains where I lived, I sometimes felt as if I had just emigrated from a country where it always rained,” Sally said. And it seemed as though I had overheard her thinking, that she hadn’t actually meant to say anything.
    A door shut with a bang and the Indian voices disappeared.
    And Sally, where will she be? I mean physically. And that too seemed like an extraordinary thing
not
to have considered. Because you don’t just go into the air when you die; you go other places first, and they’re not so pleasant.
    In the darkness, she continued. “Freddie lived on a narrow, windy cobblestone street a few blocks up from the