While I waited, I imagined it again.
I imagined following him as he made his way out of the little bicycle shop. Using the landscape that now surrounded me, I saw him trudge along the deserted street, winding uphill toward the ancient fortress, its gigantic walls glowing yellow above him, striking and unreal. I imagined stalking him steadily as he crossed the little plaza, his feet shuffling cautiously over the rubble of its broken walkway. I saw myself close in upon him as he turned into a narrow, nearly unlighted alleyway, passed under a low, crumbling balcony, and disappeared behind its veil of hanging flowers. It was there I saw myself sweep in behind him, rushing beneath the balcony, the two of us suddenly gathered together behind the dense curtain. I heard myself say, “Father,” then watch as he turned toward me. I knew that I would give him time to turn, time for him to see me, time for his body to stiffen as the word continued to echo in his mind, as he wondered hopelessly, and with a wrenching sense of terror, if it could be true.
Then and only then, I would strike, raising the blade above his trembling, horror-stricken face. This is for Laura,” I would tell him as I delivered the first blow. “And this is for Peter and Marie.”
For the next hour or so, I continued to luxuriate in my father’s murder, reliving it again and again, rejoicing in his agony, while the sun sank farther toward the sea, and still, he did not come out. By then the other shops had closed, their owners marching off to the nearest tavern to while away the remainder of the afternoon, while my father remained inside his shop. I’d seen the door of my father’s shop close, as well, then a hand draw down a curtain, but nothing more. At first, I imagined him still inside, perhaps piddling with his latest Rodger and Windsor. But as the hours passed, a graver thought occurred to me. Perhaps he had escaped again. In my mind, I saw him crawling out a dusty window, then trotting down a narrow alley to where a small boat waited for him, bobbing lightly in a peaceful sea.
For a moment, I felt a great terror sweep over me, the fear not only that he’d escaped again, but that he’d escaped from me, as if, from the beginning, from that first flight into the rain, that had been his one true aim.
I stood up and peered out toward the shop, my eyes squinting against the still-bright sun, and almost at that instant the hand appeared again, and the curtain rose.
With the afternoon siesta over, customers began to come and go again. There were not many of them, as I noticed, but then my father had never been one to attract a steady clientele.
The light began to change with the final waning of the afternoon, darkening steadily until the first blue haze of evening descended upon the street. At last, the first lights began to shine from the shop windows that lined the narrow, winding route of Madre de Dios.
It was already full night when those lights began to blink off again. The one that shined beneath the tilted sign for BICICLETAS finally blinked off, too.
Seconds later, I saw him back out of the shop, pulling the door closed behind him, then turn slowly to face the plaza. A streetlight cast a silver veil over him, and in its light I could see that he was dressed like the other old men of the region, in a dark suit, with a faded white shirt that looked slightly frayed at the collar, and no tie.
He turned up the street, and then I saw his yellow cane as it hung limply from his hand. He placed it firmly on the ground and began to walk slowly up the hill, the cane tapping lightly in the nearly deserted street.
As he moved toward me, I could see that he was still tall, though bent now, his shoulders slightly rounded. His hair was white, and his face was brown and leathery, drier than I remembered it, parched by his long years in the sun. The only thing that remained the same was his piercingly blue eyes.
They didn’t glance in my direction as he headed across the street, then into the little plaza, finally going by me at a distance of no more than ten or fifteen feet. A woman nodded toward him as she passed and an old man waved from the other end of the square, but my father didn’t stop to talk to either of them.
He continued on, his feet plowing unsteadily across the dusty plaza. When he was near the middle of it, I stood up and watched him closely, as if expecting him to vanish magically into the air. In the distance, I could see him moving past the old men tossing balls in the courtyard, the women with their children, his feet raising a little cloud of dust behind him.
He was almost at the end of the plaza before I fell in behind him, trailing him at a distance, the eyes of the people in the square following me almost as intently as I followed my father.
Slowly, with an old man’s gait, he made his way up a narrow street, then, to my surprise, turned abruptly to the right and entered a small tavern.
He’d already taken a seat behind a round, wooden table when I entered the same tavern seconds later. There were other men around him, men at other tables, old men who looked as weathered as he, their eyes deep-set and encircled by spidery webs of dark lines, their skin deeply furrowed. But they were shorter and rounder than my father, who still retained something of the tall, lean figure I remembered from my youth. It was clear that they knew him, perhaps even associated him with the American cowboys they’d seen in movies and on television, the silent, solitary, lethal men whose brave adventures made their dull, familial lives seem small and cowardly and of little worth.
I took a seat across the room and watched as my father ordered his first drink. When it came, I saw that it was sherry, a drink that struck me as quite bland for a man who on a rainy November day had, with the help of “someone else,” taken a shotgun to his family.
There he was, but still I found that I couldn’t approach him. And so I watched from a distant corner, my fingers tapping rhythmically against my knees, my eyes moving toward him, then away, as if fleeing a flash of brutal light.
The night deepened hour by hour, but my father didn’t leave his chair. One sherry, sipped slowly, was followed by another. He ordered a plate of sliced ham and a piece of bread smeared with tomato, eating his dinner at a leisurely pace, his blue eyes closing from time to time as he leaned back tiredly against the tiled wall.
From time to time, other men would sit down with him and chat awhile, but my father seemed to greet them distantly, talk to them absently, pay them little mind. As each one left, he merely nodded slowly and said, “Adios,” in a tone that seemed faintly sorrowful, so that even in the grip of my hatred I sensed that there had been a loneliness to his exile, things he had endured, losses he had silently absorbed. For a moment, I was able to imagine the long night of his escape, the flight to a distant land, the constant shifting from town to town, the years of fear
