It might not have been wise to sleep, but it was afternoon—nothing ever happened in the afternoon, everyone slept, even the criminals. The fan spinning overhead, together with the heat, and the faint breeze stirring through the window slats, the breathing of my brother so close, my lack of sleep these nights before—given all this, I felt myself drifting. I heard giggling, footsteps out in the hall, rushing water, more giggling, Dazio and his girl lathering each other in the shower. I should have warned them of the danger outside, but it was still light, they wouldn’t be going out, not so soon, and perhaps it would be wiser to worry about my own escape. I saw myself as in a dream, wandering down into the barrios. The streets grew narrow, full of litter. I kept walking, drowsing as I walked. The people knew my face. It appeared on rags, on old newspapers tacked as insulation against shanty walls. The young men watched me, hands in pockets, cradling their dicks, eyes alive with a steel glint. A boy smiled at me, back in the land of blue jeans and soda, and a hand grabbed my thigh, reaching up from down below.

I was awake now. Or half-awake.

It was my brother’s hand on my leg. His fingers on my thigh, up under my skirt.

He pulled me under.

Call it a dream if you want. A dream I’d had many times and forgotten as soon as it was over.

––––––––

It was later now. The heat hadn’t broken, and I was coated with a film of sweat. My closet had been rifled, my things disarranged, and my brother no longer lay in bed beside me. I heard rummaging down the hall, drawers opening and closing. I peered outside. Men often loitered in the plaza below the terrace wall, whistling and catcalling, more as evening drew on. Through the slats I saw the thin one, the marionette, his crooked shadow sketched like graffiti along the cobbled wall. Another man loitered farther below, sitting on a porch stoop, a sharp-looking man, smoking a cigarette, studying his shoes as he smoked. He could have been any one of the rakish men who wander the streets here. But I recognized him. The way he moved, how he flicked his ash into the street, glancing at a passing mulatto girl.

The man was Lodovico.

I went down the hall. Zanche lay as before, under the ceiling fan in the central room. Her bedroom had been disarranged. Johnny’s doing, I guessed. At her window, nearer the street, I got a closer look at Lodovico. He sat on the stoop, watching the mouth of the alley that led by twists and turns from our building to the Avenue of the Sacred Queen. But he didn’t have access. The cyclone gate was locked and strung with concertina wire.

I wondered where the third man had gone, the burly one in the gray work clothes. I wondered if he’d found the back way. Then I saw him farther down, urinating against a stucco wall.