Circa 1975, Henry sat at a cafe table turning a glass of jerez in his hand. Suddenly, he felt that he was not looking at his arm but at someone else's, the arm of some one he did not know and would probably never meet. As he focused on the arm, he felt his whole body become the body of a person completely foreign to him.
He was filled with a sense of the emptiness of a future that seemed to stretch out blankly ahead, like the luminous, lonely street arcaded with shadows in De Chirico's painting, "Mystery and Melancholy of a Street."
Nothing moved, except for the flies crawling on his arm or along the sugary rim of his glass; the plaza was dry and hot, the sunlight so intense that he saw spots whenever he looked into it. His hair felt like a lead helmet.
Then some girls walked by in skirts and platforms; one flashed a devious smile his way, and he bit the rim of his sherry glass to keep himself from shouting out to her to stop, to come back, to be his girlfriend. How could he say the things in Spanish he needed to say to her? But the truth was he couldn't say them in English, either. He wasn't good with words.
He carefully rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt and slouched, extending his legs out before him so that the sunlight sliced them in half at the knees.
More girls passed, always in twos or threes, and the handsome young men sitting on parked motorbikes under the shadow of the cafe arcade shouted after them as the girls, leaning together, bumped heads, their faces alight with sly amusement.
Henry had already hitchiked all over the country, even into the desert south, where his lips cracked and his curly hair filled with dust. His jeans were stiff as cardboard from the dirt in them. As the sun heated the fabric, it gradually became too hot to touch.
He left after a little while, but came back to the same cafe at twilight. He drank a few espressos and then wandered off into a maze of identical streets, walking slowly with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
Poised on platform shoes outside a movie theater stood a girl in a blue dress with long, chesnut-colored hair, one hip jutting out provocatively as she spoke to a middle aged man. Finally, she grabbed his elbow and strode off with him. He slung the jacket he was carrying over his shoulder.
Henry walked in circles for another two hours before finding himself again across from the movie theater, now shuttered for the night. Again, the girl was standing outside it. She was smoking a cigarette with rapid, feathery gestures.
With a feeling as of the heart falling out of his body, Henry stepped off the curb and crossed the street to her. He stopped and took his hands out of his pockets when she looked into his eyes,as if calculating.
She blew out a pencil thin stream of smoke.
Henry spoke a few stammering words of Spanish. Did she want to accompany him for a walk? Or perhaps to a bar for a coffee?
She turned away; Henry, following her gaze, saw an old man sitting on a lawn chair outside a small tobacco and magazine shop. The old man had a bullet-shaped head and a Michelin map of scars on his face. Henry felt that he shouldn't stare.
Then the girl seized his arm and, pushing her body close to his, led him quickly around the corner.
It was like being carried along on a rush of wind. He walked with no perception of the cobblestones and, except for one brief flash of terror, no feelings.
In the hotel room, he folded his stiff blue jeans over a chair as the girl divested herself in exactly three motions of her dress, bra and filmy cotton underpants.
They lay together on the bed. Henry started at her ankles and crawled slowly up her body, kissing the cold knees and the crinkled hairs at her crotch. At one point he glanced up sharply, imagining that she was laughing at him, but she was only writhing a little, biting her forearm as if with pleasure.
She didn't shut her eyes as he slipped into her. He was so excited by this that he lost his control and rushed over the edge too soon. She laughed and hit him on the shoulder.
Afterward, he stroked and kissed her bare arm, the marble-smooth curve of a hip -- the same hip he'd seen her jut out so provocatively earlier that evening. Rain, heralded by a smack of thunder, crackled on the windowpanes. Henry fell into a snoring sleep. While he was dead to everything, the girl slipped on her clothes, deftly emptied his wallet of folded banknotes, and left.
He saw her a few days later in sunlight outside the cafe, sitting sidesaddle on a parked motorbike, delicately licking around the rim of a cone heaped with ice cream.
