“Don’t I look like a grown woman?” she asked. “Do you think I think it’s just a joking relationship?”

I laughed. “Everything’s okay. Everything’s set,” I said, and tried to make a jest of it. “I don’t leave home without it,” I said, trying to put on my best Karl Malden grin.

She sipped her tea.

“I’ve had a lot of women stay here,” she said, after a moment. “I like you best, but the others, too, as soon as he appears, make cow eyes at him, and he starts throwing sweetheart lances—love lances—at them.” She looked at me carefully.

“I know,” I said. “I guessed.”

“The flirting looks in the beginning,” she said. “Then very abruptly, they leave.”

I said nothing. I could feel my bowels loosen. I shifted in my chair, stayed seated.

“You’ve braved it the longest.”

“I’m not braving it.”

“If he hadn’t run off and tried to pursue another destiny that wasn’t meant for him—maybe you’re just one of the weird ones, or maybe because of your own little malady—but I like you anyway . . . Have they loosened yet?”

“What?”

“Your bowels.”

“They’re too loose.”

“You better run, girl,” she sang the American rock song.

I couldn’t hold my laugh or my shit in.

When I came back, bathed and changed, she said, “That’s only the first clearing out. It won’t have that same effect anymore. I mean, you can sip it anyplace, anytime, carry it around in a thermos. I’ll dry some for you, so that you can take it with you.”

“When I leave?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” she said, scratching her neck. “I know you’re not those other women, that you’re not leaving because of him. You’re leaving because of yourself. You’d leave even if he were some ordinary stranger.”

“Man,” I said.

She sucked at her teeth. “Yeah, even if he were just some everyday man.”

32

Ensinadelo (Ensinanco) and I pulled the lounge beach chairs into the sun. The air was clear. I wondered if his white legs would sunburn. I rubbed Vaseline and cocoa butter onto them. This was the first time he’d been brave enough to wear swimming trunks. Of course people stared. They gawked. How could you expect them not to? In fact, I could tell nationalities by the way they looked at him. Americans were the first to gawk, to stand and gawk, and no bones about it. One American even took his picture (not up close of course, but from a safe distance), took several pictures, and then came back and took another one. The English looked once and were done with looking. The French looked, were amazed and fascinated, but pretended they weren’t looking. The Swedes looked, came over, and jovially discussed the matter with us. The Germans looked, pretended they weren’t looking, and pretended furthermore that there was nothing phenomenal in a man made thus, no different from any other ordinary human being; if he had had a belly made out of a tin drum they’d have pretended he was just like them. When they went back to their hotels, though, they wrote about him in their notes, and feared and worried that there was such a stranger in the world, and wondered whether the genes in the lower part of his body were different from those in the upper part. Italians came over and shook hands. His fellow Brazilians did all of the above. Some of the Catholics crossed themselves. His favorite was the man who took pictures. He’d gone toward the man the second time he came around but the man thought it was to do some violence and ran; but actually it was to ask for a copy of the picture of himself. It had never occurred to him to have anyone take a picture so he could see how he looked in the world.