Chapter One
Directions in the Barrio
The first thing Camila Rios learned about her new address was that it did not need one.
She had the paper in her hand, the lease with its seals and its strange clause, and she stopped a woman with shopping bags to ask the way. The woman did not look at the paper. Ah, she said. You want the corner past La Paloma. Everything is past La Paloma. Go down, turn where the old man drinks his coffee, and you are there.
Which old man, Camila asked.
The woman looked at her with the particular pity the barrio reserves for people who have to ask. There is one old man, she said. You will see.
She saw. On the corner where two cobbled streets met at an angle old enough to predate the idea of traffic, a building stood with its eyes painted shut. Two storeys of tall shuttered windows, the paint on the glass gone the colour of old milk. Double doors under a carved stone dove, wings spread, streaked by eighty years of rain and still, somehow, mid flight. And on the pavement before the doors, at a folding table that shone with the polish of daily use in a street of honest grime, sat the old man.
He was drinking coffee. He was facing the door. He was dressed the way men no longer dress, jacket and collar on a warm morning, and he sat the way dancers and soldiers sit, as if the spine were a promise someone was keeping.
