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1.
The car coasted down the center of Avenida de Mayo at a stately parade-like crawl. People in flip-flops and shorts and light dresses strolled. Insects hummed in the trees and vied with the air conditioning units for the right to be the soundtrack of summer. People in sidewalk cafés fluttered themselves with fans. Under a relentless sun, the residents of Buenos Aires adopted the airs and garb of beach-goers.
When the stoplight turned red, the driver of the car evidently missed it, whether because of the sun in his eyes or because they lingered too long on the tattoed legs of a girl and the mini-skirt that rode daintily above them. He slammed the brakes and yanked the wheel to avoid cross traffic. He was not moving fast but careened into a neat stack of motorcycles lined up at the curb, scattering them willy-nilly. The car’s snout abruptly ended the life of a sapling planted just the year before, snapping it deftly in two. The driver stepped out of his car hands to his head and looked around anxiously for someone to blame. They all just stared back at him.
“Too much to drink,” the encargado beside me said. We were both standing in the shade of an entryway. He wore the heavy brown canvas uniform of his profession. In deference to the heat, his shirt was untucked. He raised his hand high, thumb stuck out as if he were drinking the last drops from an imaginary bottle. Probably right I thought. Building managers like taxi drivers develop a sort of sixth sense about what happens on the street.
I shook my head. In the time it took to ogle some girl’s legs, that guy’s day just took a turn for the lousy.
2.
Standing before the street door of my studio, sorting for the right key, I turned to see a young couple beside a taxi. The man was struggling to unfold a collapsable stroller — no mean feat! — and the woman was holding a child, tightly wrapped. The man piled numerous bags on the stroller and they took slow steps toward the door. I greeted them. “Boy or girl?” I asked. “A girl!” they said together. Their faces were exhausted but joyful. I held the door. They crossed the threshold to their new life as parents.
3.
Despite the heat, Héctor decided to set out for the pharmacy to purchase a few items he had run short of. He had gathered the empty boxes on a small table by the door as a reminder. Now he carried them to the kitchen table one or two at a time. The kitchen was the only place he could see well enough to make a list. Elsewhere the shutters were all rolled down against the heat.
Squinting at each box he carefully made a list, struggling to stay between the lines. He had made his living as a draughtsman; since he was sixteen drawing was all he knew and wanted to do: Put a pencil in his hand and he would create things from nothing: factories, pipe fittings, parking garages, fractionating towers. He held up his list to the light. The words were something wild, careening this way and that. He looked at the page in disgust and would have crushed it and thrown it to the floor except he wasn’t sure he could do any better. He looked at his hand quivering there on the tablecloth, the pencil fallen to its side. He would have liked to throw it too away.
Héctor had made it to the pharmacy. He was glad of the accomplishment. He knew that it was good to walk a little bit each day even if it was a hell of a struggle to bend down and tie his shoelaces. Some days he couldn’t. Leaving the pharmacy he crossed to the shady side of the street to walk home. In front of the tailor’s shop he tumbled. His two bags lay on the sidewalk beside him and a puddle of blood was forming under his head. Neighbors gathered around. They helped him sit up. He had a nasty cut above his eyebrow. Someone gave him a towel to hold against the wound. His arm, quivering, struggled to hold the towel in place.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me. Last week I fell on the other side of Avenida 9 de Julio. The police had to help me. I still have a bruise.” He pointed to a dark spot covering his right cheekbone, opposite side from today’s wound.
Someone from the supermarket brought a chair for him to sit in. No one wanted to leave him sprawled on the sidewalk, a puddle of blood beside him. Someone brought a pitcher of cold water but they forgot to bring a glass. Héctor waived it away.
“Everything’s just falling apart,” he said to me. “Sometimes I don’t even have the strength to button my shirt. I used to be a draughtsman but now I can’t even write a damn shopping list.” He didn’t sound mad; just forlorn.
People kept craning their necks down the avenue to see if the ambulance was coming. The police were talking among themselves, occasionally leaning into their walkie-talkies to receive information that they didn’t share with us.
I knelt down beside Héctor and put my hand on his knee. He turned to look at me through the eye above the bruise, the bloody rag covering the other.
“Señor,” I said, “Why don’t you tell me about the things you liked to draw.”
4.
That night the wild squawking of sirens woke me. They came from a distance, got louder and louder, then stopped when they were loudest. That’s how I knew they were close. Bright lights of blue and red bounced off the buildings across the street reflecting onto the interior walls of my bedroom. I pulled on my clothes hastily and went down.
As I approached a fireman whose suspenders were hanging from his waist, told me to use the other sidewalk. I told him I was a neighbor.
He hesitated then said, “The danger’s passed. Someone just fell from a balcony.”
“Fell or jumped?” I asked.
“Uh, jumped,” he said softly as if it were bad luck to even mention it.
I had noticed people milling around behind him, inside the police tape. They were jovial as if they might have been a group of friends meeting for drinks after work, albeit in their respective uniforms: police, fire, paramedic. Someone pulled a pack of cigarettes from a breast pocket and offered it around. In the center of this friendly circle lay a body, crumpled and silent, unaware but relieved it seemed that life would now be going on without him.
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