I stood up and went over to a workbench that ran along the west wall. My heart was beating fast and my hands trembled slightly with excitement as I shuffled the contents of the bench. It was littered with negatives, pots of glue and memo sheets. A red photo album with gold script writing on the cover exclaiming Feliz Aniversario lay among the discarded bridal and coming-out party pictures.

I opened the album. They were the pictures of various demonstrations Armando Diaz had photographed. Underneath the pictures in a neat but cramped block print were the dates. I flipped quickly to the back of the album, hoping that he had already entered the most recent demonstration, the one I had been at. He had. I saw a photograph of the protester that Armando Diaz’s friend had nearly been in a fight with. A picture of Emma Garcia handing out leaflets. A photo of Tommy Hutchings carrying the placard. Another of Tony Guerrero sneering imperviously back at the camera with his hands on his hips the way a bullfighter who has thrown down his cape challenges a bull. I looked through the pictures immediately preceding but I couldn’t find the one he had taken of me. Excitedly I turned back to the front of the album and tried to make myself look through it more slowly for a picture of Cathy Vega.

He had been to a lot of demonstrations. He went to the silent vigils, too. There were many pictures of the nuns I’d seen demonstrating the first time I’d gone to the Federal Building to look for Carmen Luzano in Immigration. An old woman with gray hair cut in heavy bangs across her forehead and a rosary in her hand. Armando Diaz had slashed the picture with a red pencil. Under it in his neat printing he had written a word: PUTA.

I knew that meant whore.

Another nun, a young one, not bad looking but with sensible shoes and baggy trousers, had been slashed with the red pencil. PUTA.

I turned more quickly. All of the pictures of the nuns were defaced in this way. Women who were not nuns had a big red X marked across their faces. On some he had drawn huge breasts and colored in masses of pubic hair. I began to recognize the people from Casa Guatemala. At the edge of the crowd I saw Cathy Vega. On the following page was a jagged smear of glue as though a photograph had been hastily removed. It must have been of Cathy Vega.

Who did he think she was? In Mexicali he had behaved like a jealous lover; yet he had seen her with the Casa Guatemala people. How had she explained that to him? Still more slowly, I looked through the rest of the photo album, but I didn’t find another picture of Cathy.