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when he was near, when she smelled him, when she heard him speak, even when he was talking to someone else, she understood. Love was supposed to be complex and without a solution, or so she thought until she suffered it, and then she saw that it had no conditions, and that it was simple and brimming. Her heart ached. And her shoulders and her breasts and her thighs.There’d been one other before him, a boy from her village who used to ride the boat to school with her, and with whom she’d read assignments, and to whom she’d offered the occasional kiss in a dark street near the market, leaning against the stone wall of a carpintería, folding into each other so that she and he were one. But now she realized that boy had been nothing. Nothing.
    Doctor Mann had the motorcycle, and within a month they were riding together on Sundays to the various pueblos around the lake or down to Patulul, where they walked through the market. He would pick her up early, and because he had only one helmet he insisted she wear it and so she did. The wind blew his hair back against the shield of her helmet, and she wrapped her arms around his waist, and when the road was straight, he took his left hand and held her wrist or her fingers. And then, after returning to the pueblo, he parked the motorcycle beside his bungalow, which was behind the hotel that overlooked the lake. They sat on his porch, he in the hammock, she in a chair, and he drank a Gallo while she drank water. And they talked. She said that she loved this time in the evening, when the birds had settled down, and the day was over, and the tumult of the day had finished. She chose the word “tumult” because he had used it just that morning when talking about the tumult of his heart. She liked the word but thought that it was much too dramatic to talk about his heart. It was too intimate.
    He said that she was hard to reach.
    I’m not, she said. I’m right here.
    She had not thought about him physically, other than in a dreamy way, and in her inexperience she imagined lying with himin a clean bed, side by side, fully clothed, and they held hands and talked, and perhaps kissed, but they did not touch other than to stroke each other’s face, and they spoke of love but did not act on it. And so it had to be that the first time she acted on her love for him, she was utterly surprised by his quick, hard need. She was also surprised by the colour of his body. She of course knew that he was blond and his hands were white and his face was white, but she was not prepared for his whole body to be white, and for a moment, when he stood before her, everything was a surprise. She kept her T-shirt and socks on, which made her feel safer, and yet unclean in some way, and when he slid her T-shirt up to her neck and kissed her there, she thought this was all fair and good, but it was not as she had imagined it. There was some tenderness, and he called her beautiful, but it was as if he was talking to himself. The lamp beside his bed was on, and though it was dim, she asked if it might be turned off. He did so. And then it was dark, and it was easier, because now his body was in the shadows, and she could have him without actually seeing him, and she found it good to touch him and be touched. She felt his breath on her neck and on her cheeks and on the top of her head, and she imagined a white piece of paper on which there was nothing, and all that nothingness turned into layers of clouds through which she fell. When it was over, she thought, So this is it.
    She became freer. They sometimes went to his room in the afternoons, occasionally on Saturdays, when he met her by the pier as she returned from school in Panajachel. On those days, she hopped on the back of his bike and they rode straight to hisbungalow. She had become accustomed to being with him in the afternoon light. She liked to study his body. And she liked him to touch and talk to her body. At times they