He wrapped the spare twine back into a ball as he smiled at me. He knew.

He circled the tree the rooster was tied to, his fingers lightly tracing the bark. “Poor thing. Look at this.” A cement cistern had been cruelly dug deep into the tree’s root system. Dead leaves curled along its withered branches.

He cast a wary glance at the shack just yards from us; its door hanging off its hinges, a feed sack for a curtain billowing in the one small window. “You can know a person by how they love their trees. Their animals.”

I was only half listening to his words, because he sounded like a kind of music.

I had no idea who he was yet, really, even this side of him, the sweet side. All I could do then was spend every waking moment with him—and every sleeping one—in his tiny flat near the clock tower in the main square, on the second floor over a store that sold cheap plastic shoes. From then on, I would associate the reek of rubber and glue with sexual ecstasy, with longing, with the abject terror of letting go.

FOUR

– APRIL –

We met at dawn on the mornings I worked the night shift at the Versailles and couldn’t stay with him. Just to have a few minutes together before the work and grind of the day. Steps from his shop was an outdoor breakfast hole-in-the-wall that served vegetable truckers and farmers bringing their animals through town for the morning markets. A grungy, impossibly dusty place where the owners would call back to the cooks when we arrived, to say, simply, los amantes están aquí—the lovers are here—and in moments our coffees and pastry would arrive, the waiter all smiles and winks.

One bright cool morning, Omar shuffled to our table with a book bag slung over his shoulder, a pleased grin on his face.

“Sorry this is late,” he said, sliding in next to me. “But you keep me pretty busy, you know.” He tore some sheets from a notebook and handed them to me.

I swept the papers around to have a look. Omar in English. I couldn’t even picture it, but there they were, pages of his words in blocky capital letters.

“It was harder than I thought, Lily. I had to use the dictionary for almost every word. Okay,” he said with a smile. “Every word.”

I laughed, glancing it over. “This is really good, Omar.”

“So you’re giving me an A for ‘excellent’?”

I slid the papers back to him. “Not until you read it aloud to me.”

“What? No.” He shook his head. “That wasn’t part of the assignment.” He glanced around at the rough men who filled the place, as many of them drinking cerveza as coffee before eight in the morning.

“So you’re just going to hand out written notes when you’re a guide?”

“Come on, it’ll sound like a five-year-old wrote it.”

I smiled. “Omar, no one is listening but me.”