Hot Night in the City

The First Mourner suggested that they invite Madame Utuburu to watch with them. After all, the two women had been neighbors for more years than boys have naughty thoughts. But the Second Mourner wondered if it might not offend the Departed One to allow her lifelong rival to nose about in a kitchen she hadn't had time to clean. After some deliberation, it was decided that they would tidy up carefully, then invite Madame Utuburu to join the wake.

Stiff and very, very proper, Madame Utuburu sat in her neighbor's kitchen for the first time in her life. Awkward silences were followed by spurts of forced conversation that collapsed into broken phrases, then faded into feeble nods and hums of accord. None of the mourners wanted to praise the widow in the presence of her rival, and no one dared to gossip about her in the presence of her spirit, so what was there to talk about? Finally, to everyone's relief, Madame Utuburu rose to go, but the First Mourner urged her to follow the ancient tradition and take some little trifle from the house as a memento of the Departed One. At first she declined, but finally—more to get away without further embarrassment than anything else—she allowed herself to be prevailed upon. After she left there was a long moment of silence, then a gush of repressed talk burst from all the Watchers' lips at once. Why on earth had she chosen that as a memento?

The whole village came to see the widow off to her reward. Only after standing beside the grave for a respectable amount of time, shivering in a wind that carried the smell of mountain snow on it, did we begin to drift away, the women to their kitchens, the men to the mayor's cafe/bar to take a little glass as they discussed the priest's warning that every hour of life wounds, and the last kills. ...All right, maybe two glasses.

Madame Utuburu had not intended to linger beside the grave; it was simply that she didn't notice the departure of the others. Fully an hour passed before she lifted her eyes and, with a slight gasp of surprise, realized that she was alone. Alone. With nothing to mark the passage of her days. No one to prompt her to greater efforts at gardening and greater praise from the village. No little victories to warm her throat with flushes of pride, no little defeats to sting her ears with flushes of shame. Nothing left to talk about but her expensive, beautiful, hand- embroidered silk cushion from Buenos Aires.

Winter descended from the mountains, and when its task of purifying the earth with cold was accomplished, retreated slowly back up the slopes, allowing spring to soften the ground and melt-water to fill the rushing Uhaitz- handia with waves that danced beneath the earth-colored foam. This was the season when Madame Utuburu usually set out her piments under cloches to get a month's headstart on the rest of the village, but somehow she did not feel up to it. What was the point? She had no husband to feed, no son to praise her spicy piperade, and now no neighbor to vex with her superior crop. Maybe she wouldn't bother with the piments this year. Indeed, the task of planting a garden at all seemed terribly heavy and unrewarding.

She began to—I must not say 'to understand', for she never submitted the matter to the processes of reasoning. She began to sense that her rival had been... not something to live for, but maybe something to live against: a daily grievance, an object of envy, a reason to get up each morning, if only to see what villainy she had been up to.

Down at the lavoir, a woman brushed a lock of hair from her forehead with the back of her soapy hand and commented that three wash days had passed without Madame Utuburu showing up. Her neighbor at the next scrubbing stone set aside the paddle with which she had beaten her laundry clean and said that perhaps a couple of them should go down to the edge of the village and see if anything untowards had befallen. After all, she's no longer young and— But look! Here she comes!

And indeed, she was approaching the lavoir with a stately tread, her few scraps of dirty laundry tied into a bundle in one hand, while in the other she carried her famous cushion from Buenos Aires, and there was something balanced on top of it.

Oh no, it can't be!

But it was. The Book. And the women were obliged to listen while Madame Utuburu divided her praises between her own son's remarkable strength and the Etcheverrigaray boy's phenomenal brilliance.

And in this way Madame Utuburu kept the Widow Etcheverrigaray alive for several years longer. And herself, too.

HOT NIGHT IN THE CITY II

There were only three passengers on the last bus from downtown: a woman, a man, and a bum. The young woman sat close up behind the driver because she instinctively trusted men in uniform, even bus drivers. She clutched her handbag to her lap, pressed her knees together, and fixed her gaze on the nippled rubber floormat to avoid making eye contact with the old drunk who sat across from her, smelling of pee and BO and waking up with a moist snort each time the bus hit a pot hole or lurched to miss one. The slim young man sitting alone at the back of the bus had been unable to sleep because of the heat and a relentless gnawing in the pit of his stomach. After squirming for hours, he had left the flophouse and deposited his bindle in a bus station locker so he could wander the streets unencumbered.

An oppressive heat wave had been sapping the city for over a week. Not until after midnight was it cool enough for people to go out and stroll the streets for a breath of air. In the stifling tenements that separated air- conditioned downtown from the breezy suburbs, kids were allowed to sleep out on fire escapes, sprawled on sofa cushions. On the brownstone stoops down below, women in loose cotton house dresses gossiped drowsily while men in damp undershirts sucked beers. At the beginning of the heat wave, people had complained about the weather to total strangers with a grumpy comradeship of shared distress, like during wars or floods or hurricanes. But once the city's brick and steel had absorbed all the heat it could hold and began to exhale its stored-up warmth into the night, the public mood turned sullen and resentful.

The bus crawled through tenement streets that were strangely dark because people left the lights off to keep their apartments cooler, and many streetlights had been broken by bands of kids made miserable and mutinous by the heat. But the interior of the bus was brightly lit, and it made the young woman feel odd to be moving through dark streets with everyone looking at her from out there in the dark. All the bus windows were open to combat the heat, but the breeze was so laden with soot that it was gritty between her teeth, so she reached up to close her window, but it was stuck and she couldn't, so she turned her head away. She saw a familiar advertising placard in the arch of the roof that assured her that she could improve her chances of success by 25%, 50%, 75%... Even More!... by learning shorthand. Money Back If Not Totally Delighted! Don't Wait! Start on the Road to Success Today! The placard showed a handsome boss smiling on an efficient, pretty woman with an open notebook. That would be her, one of these days.

She reached up and tugged the slack cord, and a deformed ding brought the bus to a lurching stop. As she thanked the driver and stepped down from the front of the bus, the young man slipped out through the back accordion doors. With a swirl of dust and litter, the bus drove off, carrying the snorting drunk into the night.

She walked towards the only unbroken streetlight on the block, tottering a little because she was unaccustomed to high heels. When her ankle buckled, she looked back at the sidewalk with an irritated, accusing frown, as though she had tripped over something. That was when she noticed him.

It occurred to the young man that she might think he was following her, and the last thing he wanted was to frighten her, so he put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle to show that he wasn't trying to sneak up on anybody or anything. It was the theme from The Third Man, a film she had seen one afternoon when she'd gone into a second-run movie house to get out of the rain. She hadn't liked it all that much, particularly the sad ending where this Italian actress just walked right on past Joseph Cotton, who loved her. She knew that people thought films with sad endings were more 'artistic' than those with happy endings, but she went to the movies to shake off the blues, and she wanted them to make her feel good.

The young man stopped whistling when it occurred to him that she probably listened to the eerie tales of The Whistler on the radio, so the last thing that would put her at ease would be some man whistling in a dark street. She gave him a real surprise when she reached the streetlight and turned on him. 'You better not try anything!' Her voice was reedy with tension. 'This is an Italian neighborhood!'

He held up his palms in surrender. 'Whoa there, ma'am,' he said in a moist, toothless voice, like that western sidekick, Gabby Hayes. 'You ain't got no just cause to go chucking a whole passel of I-talians at me.' But she didn't find that funny. The streetlight directly overhead turned his eyes into gashes of shadow beneath vivid brows; only the tips of his lashes shone, mascara'd with light, as he smiled and said in his stammering Jimmy