“You didn’t go to Madrid?”
“Not yet, this afternoon.”
“Oh.”
And suddenly an urge to be with her makes him ask, almost excitedly, “Do you like costumes?”
“Yes. Well, not all of them. That one, for example, I can’t stand,” she almost yells, pointing at the toothpaste.
“But you didn’t bring a costume.”
“I didn’t know there was a party.”
He has an idea.
“How about if we ask your teacher? We might be able to borrow one.”
And Marita says, “If you’ll stay here with me.”
He’s not sure why, but he feels an odd sort of heartache. Something physical has happened beneath his flesh, his skin, his eyelids, an imperceptible twitch in the corner of Marita’s mouth, and his, too, as if the two of them shared a reason to live. He’s shocked to discover this small facet of Marita’s — she doesn’t want anyone to know she came alone. A diminutive shame, folded up into a crease of flesh, intimate and human and not malicious in the slightest. He gives her a clammy hand. He thinks, This is what I was supposed to do.
“There’s a trunk full of clothes somewhere, things from the Christmas pageant,” the teacher says when they go ask her.
And there they are, in the memory — Marita and him, standing before a tangled wad of costumes in a trunk.
“What do you want to dress up as?”
“A ninja.”
“There is no ninja.”
“What is there?”
This is the first time he gazes at Marita’s face without looking away, as she contemplates the trunk they’ve been rummaging through. It is, perhaps, the clearest image in the entire memory — Marita’s face bent over a trunk full of costumes. It’s a hard image, full of skin and fear and eyelashes, as though someone had struck her in the face and then slipped away into a crowd unpunished, as if that had always been predestined — it would be thus, and no one could do anything to stop it. Marita’s face, full of sounds. It is there that he discovers her hardness, just as he one day discovered the hardness in Pablo, Marcos,Tejas, and Rivero — an odd, clever sort of torpor inuring them to life. “There’s a shepherd,” he finally says.
“Is there a devil?”
“No, there’s no devil, either. There’s a Roman soldier.”
And Marita says then, gravely, “A Roman soldier.”
Is that really the memory? Is Marita-the-Roman-soldier the memory, or is the memory actually more like sorrow, something that subsides and then is roused once more, like an appeased mob? Is there really a porch where they all play drop the hanky, or is the real memory the shock, the excitement behind the handkerchief and behind himself, even, when the bag of candy trips and falls on her face to great collective concern? The memory both is and is not a lie; he sees that, he will see it.
Dressed as a Roman soldier, Marita takes on new grace, and he has an absurd thought: All I have to do is find out who she is. A Roman soldier with a plastic breastplate and a bent sword leading a battalion of grown-up shadows. A Roman soldier whose panties show when she bends over.
“Do you want to meet my boyfriend?” she asks.
“Of course.”
The pirate-boyfriend. And then she confides to him in an aside, “I don’t like him.”
“Why not?”
“I like normal boys.”
And just in case he didn’t get it, she adds, “Normal boys like you.”
They make their way through that game, in the memory, the Roman soldier and him. Is that the game? Pretending not to pick up on Marita-the-Roman-soldier’s flirting, or is it turning his gaze upward and suddenly seeing the day shining down vertically beneath a wide-open sky? Underneath the memory, from that second on, is a magenta-colored flame, like a subterranean river, something darkened.
“I’ve always liked normal boys, but they don’t like me.”
It’s not a heavy-hearted profession but a sweet, oafish statement of fact, like saying It’s daytime out. He gives her his hand once more. Five fingers, thick and strong, like those of a grown man.
Various scenes from the memory collide in a granular light, overlapping, piling on top of one another until an almost animal sort of presence emerges. Not seeing Marita’s face as clearly as before helps him understand it better. It’s become a state, an actual presence. He sees that in her own way, she’s proud, because when a game is being played, she uses her physical strength (she’s stronger than the others) to assert herself. He sees that she lives entirely unprotected, and that inside her brain there are dead-end labyrinths where she sometimes gets lost, like a girl collapsing in a sudden fit of desperation, as if telling herself, out of fear, that there’s nothing there. And there is no hope, but nor is there sorrow, just a teenager concentrating very hard on being nothing. A small, round nothing. He understands, too, that each part of Marita’s personality reveals a great capacity for attention, that she observes everything with care, and that he himself has become, for Marita, an object of wonder, because when his shoelace comes undone and he bends down to tie it, she says, “Let me do it, I tie laces very well.”
And she makes a double knot, too tight, lingering over it, as though wanting to savor the scene and keep it for herself.
The morning is long, with time enough for many games. In some, the families participate, partnering up with the kids; in others the children play alone and the families look on. Marita is different from the others in a peculiar way — for her, the fun of the game resides solely in being observed, so if he stops watching, she stops playing. And as he’s watching her play a game in which they have to run to carry balls from one basket to another on the opposite side of the schoolyard, it occurs to him that he knows her, pure and simple, he knows her as well as if he’d spent many afternoons like this by her side. She comes running back to him and hugs him. Her Roman-soldier body transmits its heat, its heartbeat, its physical strength. He doesn’t have to say anything to her in order to save her, all he has to do is believe in her, in the change in the air, in her gruff hand that yanks his up obstinately to make the sign of champions. He laughs. Later he’ll wonder if all solace is like that, but in the memory the thing that stands out is simply the end of sorrow.
And sometimes in the memory, he also senses that her memory of the horror is far more certain and fixed than his, and that despite it all, she’s able to carry on, as though floating in silence. When the students are made to draw pictures, he sits beside her, and she rests her head on his shoulder, a heavy head, which she lays down and then lifts up, as though it were rebounding off something soft, and then rests back down once more.