The Last Lovely City Read Online Free PDF Page B

rags, hobbling down the beach. And Penelope, wildly out of character, for her, now thinks, I have to run after him, I have to chase that old man, who must have my key. Whether I get it back or not, I have to run after him.
    And she does. She starts off down the beach, running as best she can, but clumsily, in the deep dry sand.
    She is unused to running, but the man ahead of her is very old. She is gaining on him when suddenly he veers off the beach, to the left, and into the Tourist Market. Where Penelope follows, not far behind.
    Getting closer, she begins to shout, “Stop! Stop!”
    The market is a row of booths, now mostly empty, so early in the morning, but here and there a solitary figure pauses, putting aside a broom or a dusting cloth, a crate—to observe this chase. Penelope imagines herself, as she must look: A tall blond skinnyAmerican woman in a red bikini, chasing after a poor old man, a derelict, hysterically shouting. Why should anyone help her?
    But there, ahead of her, at the end of the row of rickety booths, to her surprise she sees the old man wheel and turn. He is standing there on one leg, a tattered old bird, maybe too tired to keep on running.
    His dark, grizzled face is all twisted, one eye is gone, the skin closed over, and most of his teeth are gone. His mouth contorts, and the bright remaining black eye stares out at Penelope. A dying Aztec, she thinks. She thinks,
Mexico
, I should not have come back here.
    Over one of the old man’s shoulders a large old brown leather sack is slung, zippered up. In which there must be her blue bag. Her room key.
    But what she (ridiculously) says is, “Did you happen to see my bag? on the table?”
    “No—” His voice is tentative, querulous, but his eye is challenging, accusing, even. Perhaps it was not he who took her bag but someone else, earlier, while she was swimming.
    Penelope finds no way to say, Open your sack up; let me see what you have inside. How could she?
    She says again, “My blue bag, are you sure you didn’t see it?”
    “Yes.” He turns from her.
    Defeated, Penelope begins to walk back through the market booths, past a sort of workers’ restaurant, just opening up, past more booths, with jewelry, scarves, leather—to the beach.
    Where bearded Ben is getting out of the water. Shaking himself, like a dog.
    He frowns a little at what Penelope tells him, but then he says, “Well, it’s not too bad. We’ll go up to the room, and you wait there while I go to the desk for another key. They should have given us two. As I said.”
    However, after the fifteen or twenty minutes that Penelopehas been standing there in the hallway, outside their room, in the gathering heat of the day, Ben comes back to inform her that it is not so simple, after all. They don’t
have
another key. Honestly, Mexico. Someone has gone to find the housekeeper. God knows how long that will take. It’s Sunday, remember?
    Since there is no existing key to their room—many keys have been lost, they are told, or simply not turned in—the only solution to a keyless room is for Penelope and Ben to move into another room. Which, once the housekeeper has been found (an hour or so) and their old room wrenched open, they finally do: with the help of several maids they repack and move all their clothes.
    The new room is lower down, and smaller, with less of a view. Not as nice.
    However, they are only here for two more days. Ben and Penelope, over their much-delayed breakfast, remind each other of this fact.
    That old man with his rags, his toothless twisted mouth, and his one defiant eye is in Penelope’s mind all that day, however. How angry he must have been, she thinks, if he opened the blue bag, expecting money, to find nothing but an old key.
    And was it, after all, that old man who took the bag, or someone else, some other stroller on the beach who had vanished in another direction before Penelope got out of the water?
    That night in the bar a young woman, another