The Last Lovely City Read Online Free PDF

them—cornily enough, in a meadow of flowers. And, as Penelope awakes, the even cornier phrase, “Forgiveness flowers,” appears somewhere at the edges of her mind.
    Nevertheless, it seems a cheering, on the whole restorative dream, and she awakens refreshed, and cheered.
    That night she and Ben walk into the town for dinner, a thing that she and Charles almost never did, and they find the town very much as it was: dingy, rutted, poorly lit streets leading toward the center, along which wary old men loiter, sometimes stopping to rest on the stoop of a darkened house, to smoke a cigarette, to stare at the night. Then stores, small and shabby at first, little groceries, ill-equipped drugstores, with timid souvenirs, faded postcards, cheap cosmetics. And then more light, larger and gaudier stores. More people. The same old mix of tourists, always instantly identifiable as non-Mexican. And Mexicans, mostly poor, some very poor, beggars, pitiful dark thin women, holding babies.
    At their chosen, recommended restaurant, no table will be available for half an hour. And so Ben and Penelope go into the small, white, rather austere church that they have just passed.A mass of some sort is going on; a white-robed priest is at the altar; everywhere there are white flowers. Penelope and Ben take back-row seats, and she watches as three little girls clamber all over their mother, who prays, paying them no heed. The girls and their mother wear churchgoing finery, black skirts and embroidered white shirts, and all the family’s black hair is braided, beautifully. Whereas, the more Anglo-looking (less Indian) families in the church are dressed more or less as tourists are, in cotton skirts or pants, camp shirts, sandals.
    Their dinner, in an attractive open court, is mildly pleasant. A subdued guitarist plays softly in one corner; there is a scent of flowers everywhere.
    “Do you really think we should marry?” Ben asks, at some point.
    At which Penelope more or less bridles. “Well no, I’m not at all sure; did I say that I did—?”
    He pauses, just slightly confused. “I didn’t mean you had, but—well, I don’t know.”
    She laughs, “You mean, not in Mexico.”
    He looks less nervous. “Oh, right.” He laughs.
    The next morning, very early, Ben says that he wants to swim. “Before those damn boats are around,” he quite reasonably says. “You too?”
    “I don’t think so.” What she wants is just to lie there for a while, savoring the Mexican dawn, just now visible between the drawn window draperies. “I’ll come down in a little while.”
    “Leave the key in the blue sack, okay?”
    Penelope lies there, deliciously, for ten or fifteen minutes. Ben will want to swim for close to an hour, she knows. She lies there, thinking of nothing—and then she puts on her bathing suit, a red bikini, puts the room key in the small blue airline bag, and starts down the path—down past the empty row of roomswhere they all used to stay (it now seems very long ago), past Rosa’s restaurant, and out onto the beach, where she leaves the bag with the key on a table beneath one of the palapas. And she steps out into the water, the marvel of cool, of freshness. She thinks she sees Ben’s dark head, far out to sea, but what she sees could as easily be a buoy.
    She swims for a while, fairly sure that dark head is indeed Ben’s. She waves, and whoever it is waves back. Looking to shore, for the first time she notices a sign, TOURIST MARKET , and she wonders what that is. She heads back in, stands up, and starts walking out of the water, up onto the beach.
    She is trying to remember which palapa table she put the bag on, and does not remember. She does not see the bright blue bag on any table.
    And slowly it registers on Penelope’s frightened consciousness that the bag is not there. Gone. No key to the room. At the same moment, the moment of realizing her loss, she sees an old man, a sort of beach bum, wrapped in something orange,