Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Lions at Lamb House Review of Jamestown Review of The Children of Húrin Review of The Politics of Life Film Review of "300" Creative Nonfiction Home By Marion Agnew One Foot and Then the Other By Greg Coykendall Poetry Hannah Plays with Light By Kristine Ong Muslim Caricature of an Early Planter By Michael Lee Johnson Comes a Push-Cart Down a Long-Ass Ghazal By Levon DeBranch Modern Day Moses By Bob Boston Squares (2) Plaza De Armas, Santiago, Chile By Graham Burchell Fiction The Larchmont Campaign By Zain Deane Body Warmth By Louise Kantro The Good People Up North By T.M. Spooner Triple Word Score By Patricia C. Meringer Texans Abroad By Franklin Strong Hunting for Manhood By Jason Sizemore Staten Island Zen By Michael Enright About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch.

Texans Abroad By Franklin Strong A close friend tells me that whenever she finds herself caught in a moral bind or a delicate situation, Isabella Rossellini steers her to righteousness. The voice of Isabella Rossellini, she clarifies, not Ms. Rossellini herself. Warm, musical, and exotic, it pipes up whenever temptation appears, gently scolding my friend if she starts to lean the wrong way. Stop kissing that boy, Alice. You’re very drunk and you know you won’t find him attractive in the morning. Things like that. As in real life, the Isabella Rossellini inside of my friend is worldly and thoughtful and always, always right. We all have that, I think. I don’t mean a conscience; I mean the voice that’s attached to our conscience. Alice’s boyfriend hears his dad, and I bet some people imagine hearing stronger versions of themselves. In my own life, whenever I have faced a difficult choice—one with a tempting wrong and a less attractive right—I’ve been guided by the tar-tinged tenor of Martín Hernandez. In my head, Señor Hernandez’s voice is neither loud nor deep; in fact, it’s not remarkable at all except for being resolute. When I falter, he lets me know it, and not gently. But he’s always there, and has been ever since we crossed paths fifteen or so years ago, when I was a seventh-grader at Langston Hughes Middle School in Fort Worth. Sr. Hernandez—he insisted we call him señor—was a substitute teacher, a dotty old man with a serious face and perpetually crossed arms. Most of the other kids didn’t like him, and I’ll admit he didn’t cut an impressive image. Shuffling along in baggy khakis and scuffed brown shoes, he looked somewhere between a shrunken John Wayne and how I’ve always imagined the Whisky Priest from The Power and the Glory. But when he appeared in our classes we never had to do any work—whatever assignment our teacher left would receive a cursory glance before Sr. Hernandez would push it to the corner of the desk, stand, and clear his throat. What we students really needed, he was sure, was to listen to him talk. About himself. The narrative never changed; essentially, it comprised the story of his life—a poor childhood with strict but wise parents, the war in Korea, loads of hard work. By far, his favorite subject was his family’s history: apparently, the first Hernandez landed when Texas was still Spain, and in fact was granted his piece of land by King Felipe V—a fact of which Sr. Hernandez was very proud. “They can sue us, they can try to foreclose on us,” he would growl, “but they’ll never take away our Spanish land grant.” It was that defiance, that utter conviction, that branded his voice on my brain, like a movie you watch all summer because there’s nothing else in the house: They’ll never take away our grant. They’ll never take away our grant. They’ll never take away our grant. *** Sr. Hernandez had a second-favorite saying, one that still pops into my head every time I sit down for an international flight or when I’m out to eat and overhear French at a nearby table. This one came at the high point of the soliloquy: right after Sr. Hernandez recounted meeting his bride-to-be at an officer’s banquet in Suwon, he would pause, maybe for drama, maybe to remember better, then say pointedly into our preteen faces, “You can travel all through the world and announce you are an American. You will get a mixed response. But if you say you are a Texan, my friends, you will be respected the world over.” Eight years later, when I was a twenty-year-old studying in Madrid—the capital of the world, as Hemingway called it—Sr. Hernandez’s dictum seemed no longer to apply. Jerry, my roommate and sometime classmate at la Universidad, announced his Texas citizenship within forty-five seconds of making any new acquaintance and, as far as I could tell, it never earned him any extra regard. Nor did his cowboy boots impress the local girls, nor the tan Resistol he sometimes wore out for drinks. I remember riding the metro through the city with him on a day he chose to wear his Don’t Mess With Texas t-shirt. This was in the middle of a big newspaper series on the death penalty; our fellow passengers—young women, old men, workers—would look up from these scathing editorials and see Jerry grinning at them, his chest emblazoned in red, white and blue. He was big and oblivious, and on top of that, just about a blank slate when it came to cultural knowledge. Jerry had come to Spain expecting to find salsa and chips on the café tables of the Plaza Mayor. That, along with his atrocious pronunciation of the language, made him a running joke in our group of mainly Spanish majors. I suppose that our program directors thought we would get along because we came from the same state, even though Jerry went to a religious school in the Panhandle while I attended the big university in Austin. More than the cultural thing, though, we were just a mismatch. I’m a pretty private person; I like to cultivate small, scattered friendships that I can leave and rejoin whenever I want. At twenty, I was sure I was going to be a writer, and I took to heart Rilke’s directive to set myself off in solitude. I wandered the city day and night. I found a little bar, dark and unpretentious, full of sharp-cornered tables and busy patrons, where I could sit unobserved with my little green notebook, taking notes on the country that was happening around me. This was incomprehensible to Jerry. For him, our little group was everything—he liked to be around them even when they made fun of him; and, despite their ribbing, they seemed to always want to be around him, too. Our apartment was always filled with Americans. Marcy, from NYU, spent more time at our place than hers; before long her roommate Michelle was a regular. Those two attracted Brian, or rather Brian followed them up one day and never left. There were others, but Michelle, Marcy, and Brian were most predictably present. They even carved out their own spots for the daily siesta: Michelle spread across Jerry’s bed, her backpack slung behind his desk; Marcy tucked into a ball on the floor; Brian on his back at her feet, staring at the ceiling. Jerry, meanwhile, sprawled at his computer desk chair, absently tossing a baseball from hand to hand. They would talk for hours like that, finishing a bottle of wine between them, and then look at me like I was a weirdo when I’d come in from exploring. *** Our school, la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, lay five metro stops and a line transfer to the west of our apartment. If you haven’t seen it, you’re not missing much—it’s just a utilitarian jumble of buildings, mixed with soccer fields and pine trees that give it an odd hint of summer camp. But I liked its metro stop, and the youthful tide that flowed out of the subway train doors there each morning. Even the vendors at the kiosks were young. Even the Africans selling bootlegged CDs from blankets on the ground. After class, all of the students in our program were required to attend a daily hour of cultural lessons, taught by the program directors—Señora Gaos and Señora Bernal—themselves. These were tedious affairs, conducted in a stuffy classroom on the north side of campus. The señoras paced the front of the class, tag-team style, dishing out gems like: Don’t call yourselves americanos. Say estadounidense—aren’t Bolivians and Chileans Americans, too? Or: How many times should you refuse if a Spaniard offers you a favor? That’s right, Lisa—at least three times. Otherwise he will find you presumptuous. Most of us resented losing this hour of time, for different reasons. Brian would rather have been home, nursing his hangover. Marcy felt condescended to—she knew all of this, she complained. Usually, she sat next to me, and I would spend the hour drawing obscene cartoons of las directoras and showing them to her. Out of the whole group, only Jerry faithfully took notes. He didn’t like the lessons, either, but he said he felt bad that no one else listened to the ladies. *** When I would come home very late I would sometimes find Jerry on our apartment’s little balcony with his Spanish books and his guitar. That was how he studied—playing Beatles songs helped him concentrate, he said. I liked those nighttime conversations: we would go over our days and then start talking about things we missed from home and, of course, the girls in the program. Jerry had a thing for Michelle, and he would draw elaborate plans to ask her out in some terribly romantic fashion, always on the next excursion. I knew he’d never do it; but I’d say I thought it was a good idea, and then Jerry would ask me about Marcy, which annoyed me. It was natural, though. Marcy and I had come together on our first night in country, after the reception the directors threw for us at La Comedia, and I guess most of the group thought thereafter that we were a couple. Or that we should be a couple, but she was too cynical for my taste. I’d try to explain that, and that Marcy was all right for joking around with and all, but not really relationship material. Then Jerry would conclude that maybe we were just too much alike, and then he would pick out the notes to “Blackbird” while I watched the street below, and then we’d both decide to turn in. *** It happened one night that I had a date with a local girl, Elena. How I came by it isn’t a big deal; suffice it to say that she was a stranger, and that it took an inordinate amount of daring on my part and a particularly welcoming glance on hers. But the date was big news in our incestuous little group—it spread from Jerry through the hallways of the facultad and among the tables of the basement cafeteria until it got to the point where I would hear my name and turn around and, sure enough, there would be a pair of Americans whispering about my love life. I say date, but Elena insisted on bringing a friend, and that I bring one of mine. To my eternal discredit, I worried about the impression Jerry would make on the girls. I waited twenty-four hours before asking him, and then hoped he might have already made plans. He hadn’t. So. The appointed night came and Jerry and I took the metro to the appointed place, Nuncio 13. Nuncio 13 was one of those secrets I hoarded—a bustling, cave-like tavern near the Plaza Mayor where you could either drink on the ground floor or head downstairs to eat and drink. The place’s address was the same as its name, so you could never get lost trying to find it. Just get to Calle Nuncio, then look for number 13. The thing to order there was huevos rotos, broken eggs, a high-piled plate of fried eggs and serrano ham drizzled over crisp fried potatoes. I loved Nuncio 13. Some places you go to and you feel like you have to keep up with the sophistication of your surroundings; Nuncio 13 lent you its charm, like a kind maitre d’ slipping you a jacket when you realize you’ve shown up underdressed. We walked out of the metro and into the dwindling daylight, and some of my uneasiness faded. Jerry was being talkative, in that good, settling way. He liked to ask me about music, and he took my answers as God’s truth because I came from Austin and had, once upon a time, been in a band. We turned off of San Justo and onto Nuncio, and I looked over in his direction for a last-second appraisal. My fears had been exaggerated: his hair was over-combed, sure, and his clothes a little stiff. He looked obviously American, but not badly so. Besides, he had left the cowboy hat at the apartment and his boots looked kind of cool sticking out from under his trousers. Before I thought too much, Jerry asked me point blank whether I thought Buddy Holly or Roy Orbison had influenced Rock n’ Roll more. Damn. It was a good question. At first you think Buddy Holly, right? But then you remember that Roy Orbison really expanded the structure of the song—how much of the experimentation, the twelve-minute songs, that popped up in the sixties can be traced back to Oh, Pretty Woman? A lot. I would have walked right past the bar had not Jerry looked up and nudged me to a stop. “Hey. ¿Estamos aquí?” Walking along the street in Madrid reminds me of a childhood trip I took to Palo Duro Canyon, in northwest Texas. My brothers and I explored it from the bottom, following the river and darting into little arroyos and caves. The whole afternoon, the sky was a blue strip far ahead, flanked as we were on both sides by the enormous rock face. It’s the proportion that’s the same in Madrid—the golden-age facades loom above you and stretch and curve into the future for seemingly ever. Jerry was right—we were there, standing in front of a tiny door cut into the massive city face, the number 13 etched crookedly into the lintel. I counted three and then plunged in. We were early. Actually, we were on time, but one of the cultural differences the señoras were never able to pound into our heads is that “on time” means something different to Spaniards than it does to Americans. I bought the first round of drinks and we settled against the bar to wait. Jerry kept up his conversation: how he wished he could start a band, how he had seen the best blues singer in El Paso. He bought the next round, then I got the next, and we talked while we watched the Spaniards around us. No city relaxes like Madrid, and it was the relaxing hour. Faces that didn’t smile all day were in full bloom. Nearest us, a trio of clean-cut men, maybe ten years older than ourselves, stood joking in well-cut suits. They were being watched hungrily by the teenaged girl behind them, the daughter in a family of four. Her parents leaned against the bar, talking above her, while her brother sat on a stool and rested his head on the wood. The barkeeper was busy but calm, and every few minutes he would retreat to the far end of the bar to sip from a beer glass he kept there. The girls showed up within the half hour. By that time, we were three drinks in and I was already pleasantly swimming. I don’t take much. I didn’t see them approach; I was still stupidly looking around, now at a pair of men across the bar pulling back their shirtsleeves to compare wristwatches. I did see Jerry’s face light up and then I felt a tapping on my shoulder—I turned to stare into the bright smiles of Elena and her friend. A sweet query: “Henry?” What is it that allows us to instantly know, with the certainty of Sr. Hernandez, how well we’ll get along with someone? I read an article recently that said that our brains take about eight seconds to form a first impression—long enough that it’s not first sight, exactly, but short enough that it’s surprising how often we’re right. There’s a lot of material to process in that time: a facial expression, a gesture or two, hair, clothes, makeup, all of the purposeful choices that go to form what we call appearance. We don’t do it consciously—our minds just compute and then the overall impression washes over us: I like. Or: I don’t like. The girls before us, our dates, were nearly identical in black pants and prettily cut tops. Their faces were bright and intelligent and warm with relief to see us. I liked. Of course, I had seen Elena before, at the internet café where she worked behind the counter, but I hadn’t remembered her timidity or the clarity of her eyes. Her hair was loose and simple and chic, and she wore a thin fabric adorned with a cloth flower at the breast. Stepping up, she touched my arm and motioned toward the other girl. “This is my friend, Reyes.” Reyes sparkled, too; she insisted on making eye contact as I leaned over to kiss her face. “Encantado. Y os presento a mi amigo Jerry.” Apparently forgetting the señoras’ lesson on the double-kiss greeting, Jerry leaned in for a big American handshake. “¿Cómo estáis?” Reyes and Elena both smiled—whether at Jerry’s pronunciation or the awkwardness of it all, I don’t know—and the four of us headed downstairs. I won’t bore you with everything we talked about or all of the pauses, which, any other night, might have doomed our date. Straddling two languages with someone else can be agony or it can be like figuring out a jigsaw puzzle together, adding an extra layer of understanding into the other’s thoughts. Elena kept surprising us with little jokes, and Reyes proved adept enough at English to bridge any breakdowns in our Spanish. The best news of the night, though, came when it became apparent that the best parts of Jerry’s personality translated. He was a master of flattery—that much would have been true if his mouth were sealed shut and he had to communicate with hand gestures—his self-effacing smile played well, and he asked the girls a dozen questions I never would have thought of but which, once they had escaped his lips, seemed essential. Let me give you an example of his charm: Jerry asked the girls what they did. A simple question, framed in the simplest Spanish. Their answers were likewise simple: Elena, besides studying, sat three days a week behind the counter of her sister’s café; Reyes waited tables at another café opposite the royal palace. “¡Qué romántico!” Jerry exclaimed. Now, you take a statement like that: it’s neither profound nor original, but it’s not exactly the word choice you’d expect when a girl has just finished describing her waitressing job in a touristy section of the city. But we could see it: Reyes, solitary and dressed for work in a black skirt, locking up her Hapsburg-era walkup and setting off to serve pastries to the underlings of royalty. Romance had been attached to her life, and ours by association, and we all warmed up another quarter degree. My huevos rotos came. They were followed by a host of plates as the girls ordered anything that caught their eye: octopus, drenched in garlic and oil; mushrooms; whole flayed anchovies. All of it glistening in the restaurant’s yellow light, each plate’s arrival accompanied by congratulatory glances from the tables nearby. Jerry’s turn to order came and he picked out tortilla española and calamares. Elena nudged Reyes. “What?” “In Madrid, we say that you can always spot a tourist because he always will order ‘tortilla y calamares’”. Jerry blushed, but he was vindicated when the tortilla arrived. It was golden and rife with onions, far from the eggy messes we had been surviving on at the Plaza Mayor. By now, all pretensions were far behind us and we all four dove at the tortilla with our fingers. We ordered more drinks—if I had been swimming before, I was now helplessly at sea—and I felt myself leaning into the table, which was small, bumping hands with Elena. There was a feeling that things were already settled. How could they go wrong? After you consider the alcohol, the food, and Jerry willing the night to go well, there was no angle for the evening to take but up. The surest sign things were sailing along brilliantly is that Elena asked me what I wanted to do after college and I said write. Then we started talking about books. I never, ever talk about books. Or maybe it’s that I always try to talk about books, but it never takes, even if the person in question is a book lover. It’s a matter of differing tastes, I guess. Elena listed her favorites, absently sucking on an olive. She had developed a charming way of disposing of the pits: holding her small fist over her mouth, she used her tongue to discreetly push the stone between her fingers. An elegant solution to an inelegant necessity. Jerry asked the girls if they wanted to visit the United States—he was careful not to say “America”—and both replied sí. The madrileño sí that sounds more like she. “New York,” Reyes volunteered. “The canyon of the Colorado River…” “Las Vegas, Hollywood…” Elena added. “No, no,” Jerry put on a mock-hurt face. “You’ve got to come to Texas. West Texas sunsets are the best in the world. And outside Amarillo there’s this ranch—you know ranch? Rancho? Where they’ve buried Cadillacs halfway into the ground. Called the Cadillac Ranch?” He used an almond to illustrate the half-immersed Cadillacs on the table. Improbably, Reyes and Elena seemed convinced. A half-finger of Cruz Campo remained in my glass. Reyes signaled—by looking around at everyone else’s empty glass—that I was to finish it. I did, and then she raised her eyebrows to the three of us. “So. Shall we go?” *** We stumbled to coffee. I’ll never know where exactly the girls took us, only that it was a rooftop and that it was lousy with elegant-looking people. Maybe we were near the opera, or the theater district. I thought of the first pages of The Sun Also Rises, Lady Brett Ashley running around Paris telling everyone she’s “tight”. I was tight. Reyes disappeared for a second, then returned with four sherries. Nor, of course, can I perfectly recall the words we spoke over the remainder of the evening. Somehow, we learned that Reyes had cried at The Dreamers and that Elena really liked Madonna and that both girls wanted to visit Russia. Before long, Jerry leaned over and invited the couple next to us—a Frenchman and his wife, in town for business—to join our party. The Frenchman had some friends at another table and declined, but after he excused himself his wife edged over. So now we were five crowded around a table that would have been small for two. The rooftop was open on three sides; there was the very pleasant sensation of our chatter mingling with the breeze and that of the surrounding tables, so that it felt like we were conversing with the whole beautiful city, or at least its most beautiful denizens. The Frenchwoman—her name was Ethel—listened gamely, watching her husband where he held court a few tables away. The breeze played flatteringly in Elena’s hair. Jerry opened up even more now that he had an audience. He really was a particularly American specimen—sociable as Gatsby, and just as hopeful: Ethel asked his post-graduate plans, and Jerry laid them out. An engineering degree, two or three years in the field. He had been saving and investing since he got his first job at fifteen—by twenty-six he wanted to have his own firm. By thirty-two, a summer home in Catalunya. Or maybe Paris, he said, nodding to our guest. This launched Elena and Reyes into a screed. Americans always like Barcelona better than Madrid, they complained, which Jerry and I both denied. The Frenchwoman agreed with us: Barcelona is so frantic, she sighed. My sherry glass was empty, and for the first time all night I decided to exercise some restraint: I stood and asked the table if anyone would like a coffee. Coming back from the bar I heard Jerry’s cell phone jangle. It was the night’s first misstep. The three women at the table looked down in distaste; not at Jerry (who had built up a store of goodwill) but at the offending machine. Jerry apologized and stepped off into a corner; coming back he smiled at me: “Michelle. They’re coming to meet us.” *** I understand what he was thinking. Once, in elementary school, we had to create personal coats-of-arms, complete with a motto. I chose “Stand fast”, my actual family creed. Not very original, I know. I have no doubt that if Jerry had been assigned the same task he would have chosen “The more the merrier”. Jerry had made new friends. What could be better, his thinking went, than sharing them with the old? Sure enough, in a few minutes three Americans—obviously drunk—spilled onto the terrace and muscled their way over to our table. Michelle, Marcy, Brian. From halfway across the floor, Brian called out, “Jerry! Henry! Introduce us to your friends!” So damn coarse. “Are these the famous dates?” Marcy looked down her nose, first at Elena, then Reyes. At some point, Reyes had moved under Jerry’s arm. Brian pulled up a table and three empty chairs. Getting back, he winked at Reyes. “So, you like cowboy Jerry?” Michelle laughed: “Too bad he didn’t bring his hat.” She leaned into Brian’s shoulder and curled her lips—almost imperceptibly—at Reyes. I saw it; I think Reyes did, too. If it’s a well-established fact that a group of Europeans surrounding a lone American will, without fail, begin to pick at American culture, foreign policy, cuisine, and so on, something similar occurs when you surround a Texan (or two) with a group of non-Texans. Sr. Hernandez was wrong. “Did you ask him about his guns? Él tiene muchas pistolas. Pregúntale.” Marcy spoke a crisp, accentless Spanish. She practiced all the time—even when she was just with us—and now she was showing off. I could tell Elena and Reyes were annoyed. They looked at Jerry, who was beaming and reaching for words. “Es muy común, en Tejas, tener armas.” Of course. Of course Jerry wouldn’t have sense enough not to be proud of his guns on a date with a European girl. Fuck. Now Brian and Michelle joined in: “He voted for Bush.” “Ask him about the death penalty.” At these last two comments—which attracted spectators from the surrounding tables—Ethel excused herself to check on her husband. Marcy didn’t let up: she leaned towards me and smiled intimately, conspiratorially. “Go on. Tell us about your favorite gun, Jerry.” About this time a group of young people arrived that seemed to know our dates. This is another cultural difference, I think. Americans don’t travel in packs like that after junior high. Ten or twelve of them, the boys slender with spiky hair, the girls in black, streamed by our table, touching Elena and Reyes on the shoulder, raining hola tías and qué tals. Marcy was still pushing Jerry—Elena touched my arm: “Pardon us, we need to say hello.” She and Reyes stood up and walked away. Our table fell quiet as we watched the other group welcome them and then make space for them at the table. Brian: “They’re not coming back, sport.” Then Marcy turned to me. “Aw. Have we scared your dates off?” Forever, Marcy will believe that the girls left because they didn’t like Jerry. Or they couldn’t tolerate his views, or my coldness had put them off. It wasn’t meant to be, she actually said to me that night at the table. Maybe they were coming back; maybe I was being dramatic. But I was sick—sick of Brian’s stupidity, sick of their drunken meanness, sick of Marcy presuming to possess me and everyone else agreeing. I was just sore, Hemingway would have said. “Jerry, let’s go.” “Don’t go.” Marcy gave me this look like I was just being a poor sport. “Fuck you, Marcy.” I walked over to where our dates were seated and kissed each on the cheek: first Reyes, because she was closer, then Elena, who smelled like a flower just opening up. Jerry shrugged an apology and headed after me. Funny how people can see the same event differently: to Marcy, we were being typically American—rampaging off like cowboy godzillas, kicking over streetlights and storefronts (apparently, I bumped pretty hard into a table on the way out, spilling coffee all over my shirt; one more thing to be ashamed of in the morning). In her best Spanish, she apologized to our overturned neighbors and anyone else who would listen and wouldn’t speak to me for a week. But later, when Elena would recount the story to our mutual friends, she called it my most European gesture. She and Reyes came up to the apartment the next day, and when I begged apology for leaving them like that she said it just showed that Spain was rubbing off on me. Anyways, however it was taken, I stormed out with Jerry on my heels. At street level the air felt warmer than it had on the roof. It was too late for the metro—Jerry suggested a taxi, but I told him I knew the way home. It wasn’t far, we could just walk. For at least an hour we did—not afraid, with the security that you can only really find in a foreign country, where you don’t know the danger of being lost. “You don’t like people too much, do you?” The question caught me right at my conscience, which was just starting the slide from drunkenness to hangover. “What do you mean?” But Jerry let it pass. “Where do you go all day? And at night?” I could have shown him then, even though it was late. The statue of Federico Garcia Lorca at the Plaza de Santa Ana, the darkened museums, the cafes with red doors. But it was so hard to explain, and anyways, it was all around. Madrid in the small hours is like a giant bedroom: we walked past boys and girls groping on park lawns, teenagers spilling sweating out of nightclubs, smiling like Americans, old married couples spinning in the lights of the Puerta del Sol, the whole city moving with the nervous energy of a slumber party. I promised I’d show him the next night. “There’s a place called the Bar Taurino,” I said, “in the Hotel Reina Sofia. Real bullfighters go there, straight from the ring. Blood on their pants and everything. We can bring Elena and Reyes.” Probably he knew we wouldn’t—that tomorrow we’d be in no shape for going out—but the suggestion put him in a good mood. He walked along, one foot on the curb, the other on the street. “Tomorrow night, then. I love this place!” “Tomorrow night.”