I sat on a bench to eat a hot dog and started tossing crumbs to the little birds. It was March, and you could feel spring in the air. A boy, about five years old, stopped on one side and started watching me. Then he asked me if the ketchup was bad for the birds. “I don’t think so,” I told him. “They’re used to everything. In the winter they eat the trash stuck to subway grates.” That made him laugh. “Boogers?” he said. “Gum?” No, not gum, they might get stuck. A giggle. I asked if he wanted a piece of the hot dog. He thanked me very formally and told me that he wasn’t allowed to accept food from strangers. His father was about to take him to his grandmother’s house, and she would feed him a whole bunch of things. “I feed the birds too sometimes,” he said. He seemed very shy. There was a pause, and then he looked at me with a faraway expression. “I know you,” he said, “you’re my mom’s friend.”
He was Jimmy Archer, Elizabeth’s son, but I’d never seen him before. “I’m Emilio,” I said. “Yes, I know,” he said. He wouldn’t mind giving a few crumbs to the birds as long as there wasn’t any ketchup on them. I tore off a piece of bread for him and he began throwing the little crumbs methodically in wider and wider circles. Immediately several birds started fluttering around and fighting over the crumbs.
“Are they killing each other?” he asked in his tense little voice. No, not at all, just playing. And why do pigeons sometimes turn up dead on the ground? They fall asleep and fall out of the trees. He watched the skirmish pensively. According to him, crows were murderous birds. Crows? He nodded his head. It scared him a bit to think that a crow might be able to get into his room at night. You can’t see them. Then, as if by magic, he produced a baseball from his jacket and suggested that we play. I could stay sitting there: that was my catcher’s box. He moved away and threw me a very fast ball with lots of spin. I returned it and he got back into position once again, with one leg raised and both hands together, holding the ball up to his cheek before he threw the pitch.
At that moment a robust man with an oblong face appeared along one of the pathways in the park. He looked like a replica of Jimmy on a giant scale and had the same anxious expression in his eyes. He was smoking a coffee-colored cigarette and wore his white hair tied back in a ponytail with a rubber band. As though everyone had come to an agreement, Elizabeth arrived at that moment. The man seemed not to see her and was talking to the boy.
“I got held up in traffic, Jimmy, sorry,” he said, in a way that sounded like a threat.
“It’s… okay,” said the boy, with a brief, fearful pause in the click of his response.
The man with the ponytail looked at Elizabeth.
“He’s afraid of me but talks to a stranger in the park.”
“He isn’t a stranger,” she explained, and the two of them moved off toward the trees, talking in heated voices.
I stood up and turned away, letting them work out the issue. The boy looked at the ground with a desolate air and then I saw him going over toward his father. From time to time he turned his face to look back at me.
Elizabeth sat down with me on the bench. The man was her ex-husband, the boy’s father. They’d lived with him for several years; he was a flawed writer, but very successful. “He had a Pancho Villa mustache when I met him,” she said. She should have been suspicious, he made himself out to be a tough guy, he was always acting. We walked back through the park, and I told her about my meeting with Parker. She didn’t think I needed to worry. All inhabitants of New York (except black people) received those kinds of visits from the FBI. The black people they don’t bother to visit, they just kill them or lock them up straight away, she said… “We’d feel more comfortable if they did investigate us.”
We reached her house, and I installed myself there for a couple of days. Living with the flawed writer, Elizabeth had become an expert on flaws. She had a plan to publish an anthology of classic stories by great authors, edited and revised. She’d made a list of the defects in masterworks: Hemingway’s “The Killers” (too explicit at the end with the Swede); Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (there’s an unjustified change in perspective); Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (the second phone call is redundant); Borges’s “The Form of the Sword” (the ending with Moon’s explanation was superfluous). As for the book I’d published, if it were up to her she would have cut all of the short stories except for “The Jeweler” (and in that story she would have gone further with the account of the girl and her father escaping from the police on cross-country highways).
In the afternoon, when Elizabeth went to her office, I settled down to work in the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. I requested books from the nineteenth century and magazines from far away, opened my notebooks, and tried to forget about my worries while the silence and the lamps with their green glass shades brought me some consolation and—as they had so many times in my life—dissolved the anxieties of the present.
On the Pampa, Hudson had met a man with the aspect of a hermit, who lived alone in a ruin in the middle of the plains; he was English by birth but had gone to South America at a young age, “and he had taken kindly to the semi-barbarous life of
