I think of Papá. I was like this boy here, the shoeshine boy, that size. I knew he’d died, but didn’t know how. I cried until my tears dried up, then fell asleep, then woke up, as the ceremony continued, the visitors whispered. Someone, maybe my mother, was railing against “Unjust Death!” I understood the part about injustice—which left us without him—but I couldn’t understand how Death crept into the house and took Papá. Because that morning he was alive, on his feet, as healthy as anybody else, and he died in the afternoon sunshine. And I thought Death was a sinister figure that dealt its blows in the dark of night.

What is death, I ask the boy shining my shoes.

He raises his brown eyes and considers me from below, surprised and intimidated, though he doesn’t stop polishing.

The question was way too abstract. I change tack, and smile, to connect with him. “Hasn’t anybody you know ever died? A neighbor, an uncle . . .”

The boy bends down over his work, concentrating, then says, “Yes. Papá.”

I say nothing.

He observes me covertly, with curiosity; I can see he’s not rejecting me. I try—have I already started working on the piece?—to establish what he knows about the scope of death, where he thinks the person who dies is.

He answers that his father is in a niche. At first, his mother told him he’d gone on a trip. Now she says he’s in Heaven. He doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe in Heaven? Yes, he believes in Heaven, but that’s for good people, and his father used to hit his mother.

My day is weighed down with death. That’s enough for now. I duck into a movie theater where Alphaville is playing. I’ll work tomorrow.

•

Still, during the night, lying apart from Julia, though next to her, I think about what the shoeshine boy said and realize I never followed up on my initial question: What, for a child, is death?

I ask Julia to ask the students in her class about this. She’s alarmed, bewildered, defensive. I explain, calm her down. The series, my work . . .

She refuses, obstinately. Says it’s not normal.

“So then, I’m not normal?” I ask, to fluster her.

I know perfectly well that wasn’t what she was saying.

•

I have breakfast with Mamá. It’s a habit, the only time we ever spend together.

She tells me she ran into her friend Mercedes, and Doña Mercedes told her, “I have no family, only a TV set.”

I object. “She has children and grandchildren. She lives with them.”

“Yes, but they leave her by herself. They come and go, eat dinner with the TV on.”

The reproach isn’t directed at me, though I can deduce the moral of the story.