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“Are you going to be all right, Aaron?” Caroline said.

Shapiro saw himself, as if in a dream, standing on a dark shore. “Yes,” he heard himself say.

“Are you sure?” Caroline said.

Lady Chatterley leaned herself thuggishly against Shapiro’s shin and began to purr. “Hello, there,” he said. He reached down and patted her gingerly.

Caroline hesitated at the door, then took a few steps back toward Shapiro, and her delicious, clean fragrance spilled over him. “Your big concert’s in less than a month now…” She tilted her head and managed a little smile.

Was she going to touch him? Shapiro went rigid with alarm, but she just looked vaguely around the room. “You know, it’s supposed to be a beautiful country…” She scooped up Lady Chatterley and nuzzled the orange fur. “Chat. Dear little Chat. Are you going to take care of Aaron?” She took a paw in her hand. “Are you?”

Lady Chatterley wrenched herself free and bounded back to the floor. Caroline’s eyes—like Lady Chatterley’s—were large and light and spoked with black. Her small face was pale, always, as though with shock.

“Shall I help you with your things?” Shapiro said.

There was really only one suitcase, a good one—leather, old, genteel—which had probably accompanied Caroline to college; the rest had gone on before. “No need,” she said. Tears wavered momentarily in her eyes. “Jim’s picking me up.”

The suitcase appeared to be heavy. Shapiro watched Caroline’s thin legs as she struggled slightly with it. At the door she turned back. “Aaron?” she said.

He waited to hear himself answer, but this time no words came.

“Aaron, I know this is probably not what you want to hear right now, but I think it’s important for me to say it—I’ll always care about you, you know. I hope you know that.”

*  *  *  *  *

Shapiro awoke suddenly and unpleasantly, as though a crateful of fruits had been emptied out on him. There was an unfamiliar wall next to him, and the window was all wrong. He heard footsteps, a snicker. A hotel room wobbled into place around him—yes, Richard Penwad would be coming to pick him up, and Caroline wasn’t even in this country.

The night had been crowded with Caroline and endless versions of her departure—dreamed, reversed in dreams, modified, amended, transfigured, made tender and transcendently beautiful as though it had been an act of sacral purification. For a week or so he had been free of her, or at least anesthetized. But this morning he was battered by her absence; in this distant place his body and mind didn’t know how to protect themselves.

As soon as she’d left that day, he’d closed his eyes. An afterimage of the door glowed. When he’d opened his eyes again, the room seemed strange in an undetectable way, as though he were seeing it after a hiatus of years. Hesitantly, he brushed cat fur from the armchair and sat down.

Six years. Six years of life that belonged to them both, out the door in the form of Caroline’s fragile person. If only there’d been less… tension about money. Caroline, from many generations of a background she referred to as “comfortable,” was deeply sympathetic with, and at the same time deeply insensitive to, the distress of others. “Why not, Aaron?” she would say. “Why don’t I just take care of the rent from now on?” Or, when she felt like going to some morbidly expensive restaurant, “I could treat. Wouldn’t it be fun, for a change? Of course”—she would gaze at him with concern—“if you’re not going to enjoy it…” Sometimes, when she noticed him grimly going through the mail or eying the telephone, she would say gently, “Something will turn up.”

Though not quite a prodigy, Shapiro had been received with great enthusiasm at the youthful start of his career. He’d been shy and luminously pale, with dark curls and almost freakish technical abilities that delighted audiences. But the qualities he greatly admired and envied in other pianists—varieties of a profound musicianship which focussed the attention on the ear, hearing, rather than on the hand, executing—were ones he lacked. He practiced, he struggled, he cultivated patience, and he was rewarded—minimally. By just the faintest flicker of heat in his crystalline touch.

His curls, pallor, and technique lost some of their brilliance; his audience was distracted by newcomers and dispersed, and a sudden increase in the velocity of the earth’s spin dumped Shapiro into his thirty-eighth year. Aaron Shapiro. Caroline had been starry-eyed when they’d met, although by that time he’d already moved out to the margin of the city and was beginning to take on private students, startlingly untalented children who at best thought of the piano as a defective substitute for something electronic. Gradually he ceased to be the sort of pianist who might expect to make recordings, give important concerts, be interviewed, hold posts at conservatories. His name, once received like a slab of precious metal, was now received like a slip of blank paper.

“Things will work out,” Caroline said, although “things,” in Shapiro’s estimation, were deteriorating. She touched him less often. Her smiles became increasingly lambent and forbearing. Sometimes she called in the afternoon to say she’d be held up at work. Her voice would be hesitant, apprehensive; her words floated in the air like dying petals while he listened, reluctant to hang up but unable to think of anything to say.

Recently, he’d been silent for whole evenings, reading, or simply sitting. Rent, plus utilities, plus insurance, minus lessons, plus food—columns of figures went marching through his head, knocking everything else out of it. Once, after he’d had a day of particularly demoralizing students, Caroline perched on the arm of his chair. “Things will work out,” she said, and touched his cheek.

She might just as well have socked him. “Things will work out?” he said. He was ready to weep with desire that this be true, yet it was manifestly not. “You mean—Ah. Perhaps what you mean is that things will work out for some other species. Or on some other planet. In which case, Caroline, you and I are in complete accord. After all, life moves on.”

She was staring at him, her hand drawn back as though she’d inadvertently touched a hot stove. Was that his voice? Were those his words? He could hardly believe it himself. Those stiff words, like stiff little soldiers, stiff with shame at the atrocities they were committing.

“Life moves on,” he continued, ruthless and miserable, “but not necessarily to the benefit of the individual, does it? Yes, things will work out eventually, I suppose. But do you think they’ll work out for the guy who sleeps in front of our building? Do you think—” The danger and excitement of probing his terror narrowed his vision into a throbbing circle, from which Caroline, imprisoned, stared back. “Do you think they’ll work out for me?”

She’d retreated to the other room, and he sat with his head in his hands. Evidently, Caroline herself did not understand or accept the very thing she had just forced him to understand and accept—that he, like most humans, was an experiment that had never been expected to succeed, a little padding around some evolutionary thrust, a scattershot nubbin of DNA. It was a matter of huge biological importance, for some reason, that he be desperate to meet the demands of his life, but it was a matter of no biological importance whatever that he be able to meet them.

But that week—that very week—an airmail letter arrived from a Richard Penwad inviting Shapiro to play Umberto García-Gutiérrez’s Second Piano Concerto at a Pan-American music festival.

An amazing occurrence. Though one that, having occurred, was—like every other occurrence—plausible. The terrible feeling hanging over the apartment began to evaporate. Shapiro was embarrassed by his recent behavior and feelings, which now seemed absurdly theatrical, absurdly childish. Of course things would work out. Why wouldn’t things work out? Why shouldn’t he and Caroline go to whatever restaurant she pleased? And enjoy it. Order some decent wine, attend concerts, travel… Check in hand, he would lead Caroline into the bower of celebrity and international conviviality from which he’d been exiled. However gradually, in due course things would work out.

In the days that followed, Shapiro felt by turns precariously elated and violently dejected, as though he were emerging from the chaos of an accident that had left him impaired in as yet undisclosed ways. He would catch Caroline gazing at him soberly with her great, light-filled eyes. She mentioned the invitation frequently. “Isn’t it terrific?” she said. “Aaron. How terrific.” Her voice was tender and lingering—remote, the voice in which, when they’d first met, she’d recounted to Shapiro tales of her idyllic childhood. Then, one evening, when he came home with a guidebook, she said, “Listen, Aaron.” And her voice had been especially gentle. “We have to talk.”

*  *  *  *  *

Shapiro checked the clock by his uncomfortable bed; it would be a relief to go downstairs and meet Penwad. His brain felt unbalanced by Caroline’s precipitous entrances and exits; anything to block them. He shut the door of his dark, cramped room behind him, and descended to the restaurant; yes, unbalanced! The corridors themselves seemed to buckle underfoot.

The festival would have been an attractive proposition even at the best of times. Shapiro had played once before in Latin America—a concert in Mexico City many years earlier. The air in the hall had been velvety with receptivity, the audience ideal, and although his piece had been first on the program, they had demanded an encore from him right then and there.

The García-Gutiérrez concerto had furnished other happy occasions in his career. He’d performed its United States première some seventeen years earlier. The piano part was splashy and difficult, perhaps not terribly substantial, but an excellent vehicle for Shapiro; it glittered in his hands. García-Gutiérrez had been there to congratulate him with a quiet intensity. What would he look like now, Shapiro wondered. At that time he’d been handsome—silvery hair, tall, hooded eyes. How young Shapiro must have seemed, with his abashed, eager gratitude!

Penwad was already downstairs at the restaurant drinking a coffee. He extended, with official enthusiasm, a carefully manicured but stubby hand, and grimaced as Shapiro shook it. “We’re pleased we could get you down,” he said, and glanced at his palm. “This is our first go at the festival, I think I must have written you, but we’re hoping to bring people such as yourself annually, from all over the Americas—especially the States. We’re starting out with García-Gutiérrez as our star attraction, you see, because he’s a local boy.”

On the walls were posters of palm-fringed lakes, frosted volcanoes, and Indians smiling regal, slightly haughty smiles. Interspersed with the posters were magnificent examples of Indian textiles.

“Charming, isn’t it?” Penwad said. “Not a—an ostentatious place, but we felt you’d find it charming.”

Charming, Shapiro thought. Well, probably the other hotels were even worse. He glanced at the walls again. Charming! It was well known, what was happening in this country to the descendants of its earliest inhabitants—massacres, internment, debt slavery, torture—and, naturally, the waiters who scurried around beneath the smiling posters, looking raddled and grief-stricken, were Indians, ceremonial costumes draping their skinny bodies.

“People don’t tend to be aware how vigorous our sponsorship of the arts is,” Penwad was saying. “We’re hoping the festival will help to… rectify the, ah, perception that we’re identified with the military here.”

Shapiro’s attention was wrenched from the waiters. “The perception that…”

“Rectify that perception,” Penwad said.

Fee, Shapiro reminded himself. Fee plus lessons, minus rent, minus utilities… Well, and besides, there would be the credit. In a program note, even the most dubious event acquired grandeur. And why not? Concerts and exhibitions from the beginning of time had been funded by villains in search of endorsement, apologists, a place in history, or simple self-esteem. “Incidentally,” Shapiro said, “who is ‘we’?”

Penwad raised his eyebrows. “Who is we?” he said.

“That is, when you say ‘we’—”

“Ah,” Penwad said. “Well, I’m not including myself, actually. I’m just a liaison, really, between the Embassy and various local committees and groups concerned with the arts.”

“I see,” Shapiro said, with no attempt at tact.

“So,” Penwad said. “We’ll get you a bit of breakfast, then go on over to the Arts Center, take a little look around—Rehearsal all day, rather strenuous, I’m afraid. After that we’ve fixed up a little interview for you—I trust that’s all right—around dinnertime. Friday’s free until the concert. Joan and I will pick you up first thing in the morning to show you around.” He smiled. “Joan has her own ideas, but you must say what interests you. Then, after the concert, there’s to be a party, a reception for you, essentially, at the home of some friends of ours, very fine people here. Then plane, yes? Very next morning.” He already, Shapiro noticed, looked relieved. “Quite a whirlwind.”

“Wonderful,” Shapiro said. “But no need, you know, to take me over to the… Arts Center. Why don’t I just grab a taxi?”

Penwad waved his hand. “I’m afraid the Center is difficult to find. Most of the drivers are unfamiliar with it. Besides,” he added, “enjoy your company.” He narrowed his eyes at his coffee cup, and raised it to his mouth.

*  *  *  *  *

There was something anatomical about the Center’s great concrete sweeps and protuberances. Like all Arts Centers and Performing Arts Complexes and National Centers for the Performing Arts, though futuristic in design, it had a look of ancient decay, being left over from a period when leisure time and economic abundance were considered an imminent menace. How quaint a notion that now seemed! Shapiro almost laughed to think there had been a period, the period in which he’d grown up, no less, when it had been feared that wealth would soon cause humanity to devolve into a grunting mass sprawled in front of blood-drenched TV screens. But, no—Art (whatever that was), encouraged to flourish in its Centers, would prevent people from becoming intractable, illiterate, fat! And all the while poverty was accomplishing the devolution by itself.

“I see you’re enjoying the, ah, prospect,” Penwad said.

Shapiro became aware that he was staring down over toothy crenellations into a city cleaved by deep ravines and encircled by mountains.

“Those tall buildings are the downtown area, of course,” Penwad said. “And to the right and left, obviously, are residential sectors. Our place is over there—that’s pretty much where the whole English-speaking community has… put down its little roots. And up there on the slopes is what we call the Gold Zone.”

Shapiro, shading his eyes, noticed that the ravines below were encrusted with fuming slums. “My God,” he said.

“Incredible, isn’t it,” Penwad said, “what an earthquake can do? You can really see the damage from up here. You probably noticed the floor of your hotel. The Center survived intact, though. We’re very proud of the Center. The architect was truly successful, we feel, the way he… Yes, actually. You might be interested. A fellow named Santiago Méndez. He’s done most of the better hotels in town, and our museum. There was a lecture last year. One of our events. It was explained. The way Méndez—Well, this was some time ago, of course—Joan would be better able to… But …the …combined influences.” He gestured toward several concrete mounds. “The modernistic, the indigenous… well, motifs. A cross-fertilization, as Joan says.”

Shapiro hesitated. A bunting-like stupefaction had enveloped him. “Of… what?” he asked.

“Of…? What of what?” Penwad asked.

“Of…” Shapiro had lost the thread of his own question. “Of what… does Joan… say ‘cross-fertilization’?”

“Joan says it…” Penwad glared at him. “She says it of… motifs.”

*  *  *  *  *

The orchestra was from a small, nearby dictatorship, and the musicians had a startled appearance, as though a huge claw had snatched them from their beds and plonked them into their chairs. The conductor, a delicate and intelligent-looking man, welcomed Shapiro with reassuring collegiality, but when he brought down his baton Shapiro almost cried out; the sound was so peculiar that he feared he was suffering from some neurological damage.

How had the conductor come to find himself in his profession, Shapiro wondered. The man’s waving arms seemed to be signalling for help rather than leading an orchestra. The poor musicians clutched their instruments, staring wildly at their sheet music as they played. But then it was Shapiro’s entrance; notes began to leap froggily from his own fingers, and he understood: clearly the hall was demonic.

How to outwit these acoustics? As if this concerto were not difficult enough under the best of circumstances, with all its flash and bombast! But, of course, there was always something. Even in the loftiest, the most competently administered concert, catastrophes invented themselves from the far reaches of possibility. The piano bench would fall into splinters at seven forty-five, or the other musicians turned out to have a new version of the score, three measures shorter than one’s own, or there was a bank holiday and it was impossible to retrieve one’s tuxedo from the cleaner’s—catastrophes far beneath the considerations of music, and yet!

How synthetic the concerto sounded in this inhospitable hall! Shapiro was surprised to find himself disliking it so. He had never tremendously admired it, exactly, but he’d always enjoyed playing it: he’d enjoyed the athletic challenge of its surface complexities; he’d enjoyed the response of the audience. It was affirming, people said upon hearing it, and their faces had the shining, decisive expressions of people who feel their worth to be recognized. Affirming, Shapiro thought, as sound sloshed and bulged, gummed up in clumps, liquefied, as though the air were full of whirling blades.

*  *  *  *  *

The interview that had been arranged for Shapiro was with an English journalist named Beale. An interview: implied interest on the part of someone. There would be clippings, at least, and, perhaps, therefore some shadowy retention of his name in the minds of those people—“we”—who put these festivals together.

Shapiro located Beale in a restaurant of the hotel, much larger than his own, where they’d been scheduled to meet. “Are you tired of it?” Beale inquired anxiously. “I was hoping not. In my opinion it’s the best food in town, and the station will reimburse if it’s an interview.”

Beale’s head was an interesting spaceship shape. Colorless and sensitive-looking filaments sprouted from it, and his ears looked like receiving devices. Sensors, transmitters. Shapiro thought, noting Beale’s other large, responsive-looking features and his nervous, hesitant fingers. Beale’s suit was faintly mottled by traces of stains; his shirt, from the evidence of his wrists, was short-sleeved, and he wore, incredibly, a tie that appeared to be made of rope.

“I’m not tired of it yet,” Shapiro said. “I’ve never been here.”

Beale squinted distrustfully at Shapiro. “They didn’t put you here? They put a lot of guests here…”

Shapiro glanced around. So this was where they’d put an important musician. It was ugly and grandiose, with slippery-looking walls—the very air seemed soaked with a venal, melting luxe. “Santiago Méndez?” he said.

“Oh, you’re good,” Beale said with delight. “Seriously. If they bring you down again, insist. Nice, isn’t it? They all speak English, and the furniture doesn’t just”—he lunged toward Shapiro in illustration—“loom up at you. Now, will you drink something?”

Shapiro saw that two glasses already sat in front of Beale, one emptied and the other containing hardly more than a gold film. “Just water, thanks,” Shapiro said.

“Oh, you can, here,” Beale said. “Rest assured. Ice and all. I, on the other hand,” he informed a waiter, “will have a whiskey, why not.”

“And perhaps we could order,” Shapiro added. Well, at least someone had seen fit to arrange a party for him.

Beale studied the menu worriedly, running his finger along the print. He had quantities of advice for Shapiro about it but seemed unable to make up his own mind. “A nice chop, perhaps,” Beale said. “You know, this is the one place where it’s perfectly safe to eat pork. That is if you—” His eyes blinked and reset themselves furiously, like lights on an overtaxed instrument panel.

While Beale entrusted his order to the waiter, Shapiro’s attention wandered to posters on the wall. Plenty of charm here, too: more lakes, more volcanoes, more smiling Indians… Beale dove abruptly beneath the table, resurfacing with a tape recorder as primitive-looking as a trilobite. “I hope you don’t mind if I… There are several publications that are reasonably, well… friendly to me, but mostly I do radio.”

“Radio,” Shapiro agreed politely. “And this would be for… the English-speaking community, I presume.”

Beale looked at him blankly. “Not really. There are telephones for that sort of thing. Oh! No.” His voice became gluey with attempted modesty. “No, this is a show back home in England, you see. They often ask me for a little story.”

England. So, this was a bit more promising. “A show… about the arts,” Shapiro suggested.

“The arts?” Beale said. “Well, there’s not really too much scope for that sort of thing here. This country isn’t just churning out the artists, you know. Not a very… well, ‘favorable climate’ I suppose is the expression. Actually, it’s a show about just whatever happens to come up. I was glad when your Embassy called and put me on to this one, because there’s not really a fantastic amount. You can file only just so often about dead students before people get sick of it. Still, don’t think I’m complaining—I’m lucky to be here at all. When I was young, I was simply frantic to get to this part of the world. Astonishing place. Have you had much chance to get around? See the sights, meet the people?”

“I got in last night,” Shapiro said.

“Ah,” Beale said. “Oh, yes. Well, it is truly staggering. Very beautiful, as I’m sure you know. And the highlands—when I first came it was like the dawn of the earth up there, really. Oh, if I could only…” He sighed. “You know, the Indians here had simply everything at one time. A calendar. A written language—centuries, centuries, centuries before the Spanish came. And all sorts of other magnificent, um—appurtenances. While we were still running around in—” He cast a veiled glance at Shapiro. “Yes. Well, and the Spanish actually destroyed it all. But you know that. Burned their books, herded them into villages with Spanish overseers. Isn’t it amazing? The written language was actually destroyed, do you see. The calendar, the architecture, the books… And so, I mean, we’re slaughtering these people and so forth, but we don’t really know anything about them. And if they know anything about themselves they’re not letting on. Who are they? That is, who are we? I mean, they’re here, we’re here… It’s just terribly strange.” He smiled a misty, wondering smile, then frowned. “Oh dear. Anyhow, I tried and tried to get people to send me here. They said, ‘But why? Where is it? Nothing happens there.’ Then, fortunately, there were all these insurrections and repressions and whatnot, and that created demand, and so now I’ve been here over fifteen years!”

Shapiro opened his mouth; a blob of sound came out.

“I tried to reach García-Gutiérrez yesterday,” Beale said. “But I gathered he hadn’t arrived yet. He lives in Europe a lot of the time now, you know. They told me he’d be in today, but I thought I’d talk to you instead. I’m sure he’s a wonderful composer. They say he is. But, to tell you the truth, the man gives me the shivers. I’ve seen him around, at parties here, and I just don’t like his sort. You know what I mean—well-fed, a bit of a dandy. Suave. Eye always on the main chance. A big smile for every colonel. Ladies all love him. Government always showing him off like a big, stuffed…” Beale brooded at his drink, then waved over a new one. “Anyhow,” he said unhappily, “I’ve got you.”

Shapiro took a sip of water. He would have liked a drink, too, but alcohol affected him unpredictably. Even Beale’s alcohol seemed to be making Shapiro mentally peculiar. “Let me ask you,” he said. “It isn’t actually dangerous here, I suppose.”

“Dangerous?” Beale said. “Why? What do you mean? Not for you, it isn’t. You know”—he sat back and looked at Shapiro with drunken coldness—“I find it most comical. How Americans come down here, and they talk about danger. And they talk about this, and they talk about that. Well, I don’t endorse slavery and torture myself, but who are you, may I ask, to talk? Dare I mention who kicked off all this ha-ha ‘counterinsurgency’ business here in the first place? Dare I mention whose country it was that killed all their Indians?”

“Now, look—” Shapiro began.

“A thousand apologies,” Beale said. “How true. You’re no more responsible for your country than I am for mine. But all this simply jerks my chain, I’m afraid. It simply does. And I mean dangerous! I mean this place is hardly in the league of—I mean, one’s forever reading, isn’t one? How some poor tourist? Who’s saved his pennies for years and years and years. Who then goes to New York, to see a show on your great Broadway, and virtually the instant he arrives gets stabbed in the…” He took a violent gulp of his drink. “The—”

“Liver,” Shapiro said.

“Subway,” Beale said. “Yes.” He beamed at Shapiro in surprise. “I don’t know why that’s so difficult to… Oh, look,” he exclaimed, as the waiter set down their plates. “Oh, my darling! That is nice.” He extracted a pair of glasses from his pocket, put them on to peer at his plate, then removed them to clean them on his ropy tie.

Shapiro took a bite of his meal, but Beale’s grubbiness had damaged his appetite.

“Of course the highlands are another story,” Beale said. “The highlands, the whole countryside, really—still sheer carnage. But here in the city it’s just sporadic violence. Of a whatsit sort. Really, about the worst that can happen to you here is Protestants. Random. Of a random sort.”

“Protestants?” Shapiro said.

“Evangelicals,” Beale said. “So bloody noisy. Haranguing in the streets, massive convocations every which place, speaking in tongues—YAGABAGABAGAGABAGAGA.” He sighed. “Now, don’t think I’m prejudiced, please. I’m Protestant myself. But that’s the point, isn’t it? That one can slag off one’s own group, though one would never—That is, I, for instance, would never, oh, say, call… a Jew, for example, a ‘kike’—that’s your prerogative. But all that shouting is simply not the point of speech. I mean, the point of speech is—Well, that is just very simply not the point. And it can be terribly, just terribly annoying when you’re trying to conduct an interview or what have you, as you and I are here today.”

“Perhaps…” Shapiro began with difficulty. “That is, perhaps, speaking of the interview, perhaps there’s something you’d like to ask me.”

“Ah,” Beale said. “Right you are.” He smiled, then frowned. “But the thing is, old man—I’m afraid I’m not all that familiar with… If you could help me out a bit. That is, perhaps we’d best stick to rather general concepts.”

Shapiro nodded. “If you wish. What… for example, were you thinking we might—”

“Yes,” Beale said. “Hmm. Well, I suppose we might talk about your… oh, impressions, for example, of the country…”

Shapiro looked at him. “I only arrived last—”

“Last night,” Beale said impatiently. He drummed his fingers on the tape recorder. “Well, but just generally, you know. Just something… spontaneous.”

Shapiro pressed his fingers to the corners of his eyes.

“Not acceptable. I see, not acceptable,” Beale said, bitterly. “Well, in that case… we could talk, for example, about what it feels like to come down here as an American.”

“As an American?” Shapiro said. “I’m not down here as an American. I’m not down here as anything. I’m down here as a pianist.”

“Yes,” Beale said. “Quite.”

Heat began to creep over Shapiro’s skin as Beale stared at him.

“You know,” Beale said, “I’ve always wondered. And this is something that I think would be very interesting to the radio audience. How do instrumentalists feel about their relationship—that is, via music, of course—to the composer?”

“What are you—” Shapiro began.

“Well, the very word—” Beale said. “That is, the word literally, well, it literally means—well, instrumentalist. I mean, you’re a—”

“Excuse me,” Shapiro said. “I’ve got to… get to a phone.”

Shapiro fled into a system of corridors and polyp-like lobbies or reception rooms. Oh, to be alone! The men’s room? Maybe not. Well, actually, there was a phone booth. Shapiro sat down inside it, shutting himself into an oceanic silence. Beyond the glass wall people floated by—huge, serene, assured, like exhibits. Shapiro leaned against the wall. He rested his hand on the phone as though it were the hand of an old lover. Absently, he stroked the receiver, then lifted it, releasing a loud electronic jeer—the sound, as silence is not, of emptiness. He would tell Beale that he was unwell, that he had to go rest.

Shapiro paused at the entrance to the restaurant. Beale was sitting at the table alone, his narrow shoulders hunched and his spaceship head bent over the tape recorder as he spoke into it. There was urgency in Beale’s posture, and his face was anguished. What could he be saying? Shapiro took a step closer.

“Ah!” Beale said, clicking off the machine with a bright smile, as though he’d been apprehended in some mild debauchery. “Get through?”

“Excuse me?” Shapiro said.

“Get your call through?”

“Oh,” Shapiro said. He sat down and passed his hands across his face. “No.”

“No,” Beale agreed with unfocussed sympathy. “Oh, it’s all so difficult. So difficult. Now—” He smiled sentimentally. Amazingly, he appeared to have completely forgotten he’d been in the process of attacking Shapiro. “Not to worry—we’re going to get a very nice little segment about you. In fact”—he twinkled slyly—“I’ve already done something by way of an intro. Your name and so on, you’re down here for the festival, you’ll be playing the García-Gutiérrez… Hmm.” He removed his glasses to study a crumpled piece of paper. “And, let’s see.” He turned on the machine and spoke into it again. “You’ve played the piece before with great success… Mr. Shapiro, I understand.” He nodded encouragingly and indicated the machine.

Shapiro looked at it. “Yes,” he said, wearily.

Beale gave him a wounded glance. “In fact, you premièred the piece in the U.S., I believe.”

Shapiro closed his eyes.

“Yes,” Beale said. He took a deep breath through his nose. “Well, anyhow, that was back in, let’s see… nineteen… goodness me! You must be very fond of it.”

“Well,” Shapiro said, “I mean, it is in my repertory…”

Beale emitted a giggle, or hiccup. “I have a set of little spoons,” he said. “Tiny little silver things. For olives or something of the sort, that someone gave a great-aunt of mine as a wedding present. And somehow I’ve ended up with them.”

Shapiro opened his eyes and looked at Beale.

“Well, I don’t throw them out, I mean, do I?” Beale said. “I say.” He frowned. “Are you not going to…?” He waved at Shapiro’s plate.

“No, no,” Shapiro said. “Go ahead. Please.”

“Thank you.” Beale switched off the tape recorder and placed Shapiro’s full plate on top of his own empty one. “We’ll go on in a minute. And I think we’ll get something nice, don’t you? Most people like doing radio. It’s a lovely medium, lovely. Do you know what I especially like about it?” He interrupted himself to eat, then continued. “One meets people. Oh, I know one does in any profession—it can hardly be avoided. But I mean one goes out to meet people, on an equal basis. The voice—it’s freeing, wouldn’t you agree? Yet intimate. There one is, a great glob of… oh… pork pie!” His eyes gleamed briefly with lust. “But I mean all one’s qualities and circumstances just… globbed together, if you see what I mean. The good, the bad, the… pointless…” He paused again, and rapidly forked food into his mouth. “But with radio, you see, there’s a way to separate out the real bit. And all the rest of it—I mean one’s body, one’s face, one’s age… even, even”—he glanced around as though bewildered—“even the place where one is sitting! Well, one is free of it, isn’t one? One sees how free one really is.

“Great leaps. Teleportation. The world is so… roomy. So full of oddments. But there’s that now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality about life that makes one so very nervous. Danger, as you pointed out just now, yourself. Danger simply everywhere. Everything destroyed, lost, forgotten… Well, that’s what they want, you know, most of them. ‘There’s nothing about it in the reports,’ they’ll tell you. They’ll say it straight to your face. Of course there are ghosts, people say. I suppose that’s some help. But a ghost is simply not terribly… communicative. They haunt, they grieve, that sort of thing. But it’s all rather general, you see. Because they don’t much really talk.

“Oh, didn’t you just love it when you were a boy? It’s raining outside, your mum’s still working in the shop, you haven’t a friend in the world, then you turn on the radio, and someone’s talking—to you. Oh, my darling! Someone is talking to you, and you don’t know, before you turn that radio on, who will be there, or what thing they’ve found to tell you on that very day, at that very moment. Maybe someone will talk to you about cookery. Maybe someone will talk to you about a Cabinet minister. And then that particular thing is yours, do you see what I mean? Who knows whether it’s something worth hearing? Who knows whether there’s someone out there to hear it! It’s a leap of faith, do you see? That both parties are making. Really the most enormous leap of faith.” He paused to devour the food remaining on Shapiro’s plate, and then looked helplessly into Shapiro’s eyes. “I mean, I find that all enormously, just enormously…” He shook his head and turned away.

*  *  *  *  *

Shapiro set his alarm for 6 a.m., and slipped out of the hotel before Penwad could come for him, consequences be damned. Ha-ha—the day was his! Screechy traffic flew cheerfully through the streets, and toxins gave the air a silvery, fishlike flicker as the sun bobbed aloft on waves of industrial waste.

Shapiro walked and walked. He passed through grand neighborhoods, where armed guards lounged in front of high, white walls. And he passed through poor neighborhoods, where children, bloated with hunger, played in the gutters, their eyes dreamy and wild with drugs. Beyond the surrounding slopes lay the countryside—the gorgeous, blood-drenched countryside.

In some parts of the city Indians congregated on the sidewalk. Some sold chewing gum or trinkets on the corners, some seemed to be living the busy and inscrutable life of the homeless. Their clothing was filthy and tattered, but glorious nonetheless, Shapiro thought, glorious, noble, celebratory—like the banners of an army in rout.

Shapiro considered them with terror. The destitute. People who were almost invisible, almost inaudible. People to whom almost anything could be done: other people. At home, in the last five or ten years they had encamped in Shapiro’s neighborhood. At first he thought of them as a small and temporary phenomenon. But now they were everywhere—sleeping in parks or on the pavement, ranging through the city night and day, hungry and diseased, in ragged suits and dresses acquired in some other life.

Everyone had become used to them; no one remembered how shocking it had been only a few years earlier to see someone curled up in a doorway, barefoot in freezing temperatures. Most of the time they were just a group at the periphery of Shapiro’s vision. But when a student failed to show up for a lesson, or no concert work materialized, or the price of the newspaper went up, or some unexpected expense arose, Shapiro’s precious hands would tingle. Injury? Arthritis? Even as it was, daily life was beginning to eat away at Shapiro’s small savings. And at such times Shapiro would see those other people with an individualized and frigid clarity, would search their faces for proof that each was in some reliable way different from him, as though he were a dying man approaching the gauzy crowds waiting for judgment.

And they—what were they seeing? Perhaps he and his kind seemed a ghostly population to them—distant, fading… Perhaps at some terrible border you’d simply leave behind everything that you now considered life, forget about once precious concerns, as though they were worn-out shirts or last year’s calendar or old lists of things that long ago it had seemed important to accomplish.

Oh, it was probably true, as Caroline had sometimes said, that his fears were irrational. That he’d always find some way to manage. But when the door closed behind her that day he ought to have understood—yes, he thought, that was the moment he ought to have understood—that success, the sort of success Penwad’s letter seemed to promise for him again, was something he could just, finally, forget about.

But he had understood nothing; he’d simply sat there numb—for hours—until Lady Chatterley threw herself forward in a frenzy of carpet shredding. “Stop that,” he’d said. “Stop, O.K., please?” He’d flicked a finger at her rear, and she’d leapt, snarling. The truth was he had always been a little afraid of the cat. She was Caroline’s, but Jim, evidently, was allergic.

Shapiro supposed that, to whatever extent Caroline was thinking about him, she would be imagining him in debonair company here, taking part in animated and witty conversations of a sort no living person had ever experienced. Shapiro felt short of breath, as though Caroline were suffocating him with a pillow. “This is a wonderful opportunity for Aaron,” she could be assuring Jim at this very instant. “Really it is.” Oh, yes. He, Shapiro, must be happy so she could be.

An Indian child playing nearby in the street skinned a knee and howled for his mother. Shapiro felt an almost uncontainable sorrow, as though he were just about to cry himself. But to cry it’s necessary to imagine the comforter.

Caroline had never cared what things were really like. He’d once overheard her saying thank you to a recorded message. Everything was nice, pleasant, good. If he spoke truthfully to her, she couldn’t hear him. She despised no one. Those who were not nice, pleasant, happy simply ceased to exist.

Shapiro was ravenous. He entered an inviting little restaurant. Inside, it was very dark, but low-hanging, green-shaded lamps made a pool of light over each table.

The waiter spoke no English, but was agreeable when Shapiro pointed at a nearby diner’s plate of soup. But there had been a time—truly there had—when Caroline actually loved him, had been fascinated by him, not just by his reputation. For a moment he saw her distinctly. She stood holding Lady Chatterley, gazing into space with a baffled sorrow. “Caroline—” he said.

Had he spoken aloud? Three men at a neighboring table were staring at him with a volatile blend of loathing and amusement. All three were mammoth. One appeared to be a North American; he and one of the others wore pistols, visible even in the restaurant’s pleasant gloom, beneath their shirttails.

The waiter, bearing soup, interposed himself; Shapiro gestured fervent thanks. He took a spoonful of the soup. It was clear, and delicious. Food, he thought.

Plus rent. Plus utilities… Yes, tonight the stage of a concert hall, a tuxedo. A party, champagne, adulation. But tomorrow it was back to cat fur.

The waiter arrived with a second plate for him, huge and unexpected. A pretty selection of things that seemed to have been cooked in the broth. Mmm. Shapiro leaned into the light of his hanging lamp to poke around at it—carrots, onions, white beans, cabbage, celery, a small… haunch, something that looked… like… a snout…

One of the men at the next table chuckled softly. Shapiro glanced at them involuntarily again, and they stared back, their faces framing the teardrop of light from their hanging lamp. Then one of them, still staring, reached up and unscrewed the bulb.

*  *  *  *  *

The enfeebled musicians threw themselves on García-Gutiérrez’s last, idiotic, triumphal chord. What had happened? Shapiro felt as though he’d awakened to find himself squatting naked in a glade, blinking up at a chortling TV crew that had just filmed him gnawing a huge bone. Had he played well or badly? He hardly knew. He’d played in a frenzy—the banal sonorities, the trivial purposes, the trashy approximations of treasures forged in the inferno of other composers’ souls. Lacerating ribbons of notes streamed from his hands as he tried to flog something out of the piece, but it had simply sat there over them all—a great, indestructible, affirming block of suet.

The sparse audience stopped fanning themselves with their programs and made some little applause. Seething with confusion and misery, Shapiro stood to take his bow, and caught a glimpse of a man who could only be García-Gutiérrez, opaque and dignified in the face of tribute. At the sight, Shapiro reexperienced the frictional response of his skin, seventeen years earlier, to the man’s blandishments, like an acquiescence to unwelcome sensual pleasure.

*  *  *  *  *

Outside, Penwad resumed his post at Shapiro’s elbow. “We’ll just stick around here for a few minutes,” he said nervously, “then round everyone up and get going to the reception. Oh. I don’t believe you’ve met. Joan.”

“That was lovely,” Joan said. “Just lovely. You know, we looked for you at your hotel today. We felt sure you’d want to see our Institute of Indigenous Textiles.”

“Oh, Lord—” Shapiro floundered. “Yes! No, absolutely. I—”

“We left messages at the desk,” Penwad said.

“Well,” Joan said. “Those people at the desk…”

Night had ennobled the Center. Musicians and members of the audience milled about in the uncertain radiance of stars and klieg lights. A slow, continuous combustion of garbage sent up bulletins of ruin from the hut-blistered gorges, which were quickly snuffed out by the fragrance drifting down from the garlanded slopes of the Gold Zone.

Penwad pointed out various luminaries. There was a Cultural Attaché, a Something Attaché, several Somethings from the Department of Something—it was all a matter for experts.

“And do you see the lady over there?” Joan said, nodding discreetly in the direction of a stunning woman with arched eyebrows and a blood-red mouth. She was bending toward a boy who appeared to be about fifteen. “Our hostess. The reception for you is at her house. And her son. Well, as you see. They’re identical. You’ll enjoy talking to him. Perfect English—he’s going to boarding school up in the States, and he just loves it. He loves to meet our visitors. The father’s cattle, you know. Special, special people. Josefina’s a marvel. You’re not going to believe the house. She’s a real force behind culture here. And, you can imagine, some of these wives…”

“Wonderful people,” Penwad said. “And of course you two know each other from way back.”

García-Gutiérrez had joined them, murmuring thanks to Shapiro. He was as handsome as before, though he’d be over sixty—a great tree of a man, at which age was hacking away fruitlessly. His loaflike body was still powerful; his long arms and legs, the musculature so emphatic one felt aware of its operations beneath the very correct clothing, the straining neck and jaws, the hooded eyes. “I feel that you brought something new to my music tonight,” he was saying. “Something of a darkness, perhaps.” In the man’s lingering examination Shapiro felt the blind focussing, adversarial and comprehending, the arousal of the hunter. “Very interesting…”

Oh, that night seventeen years earlier! When it was reasonable for Shapiro to assume that he himself was going to be one of the favored. That he, too, would be respected, dignified, happy… The audience that night! How gratifying Shapiro had found their ardor then, how loathsome now, in memory. How thrilled they had been, seeing their own bright reflection in all the weightless glitter.

“We’ll talk more, you and I, at the reception,” García-Gutiérrez whispered, and glided off with Penwad and Joan to a huddle of musicians, who watched their approach with alarm.

Shapiro’s heart jumped and blazed. People were beginning to float toward the parking lot. He played better now than he had then, but it made no difference—no difference at all. And those nights at the stage door; the faces, golden in the light, diamond earrings winking in the gold light… All the beautiful women. Gone now. No matter. What was it they’d adored? Those ardent glances, warm in the glow of his fame, the first shock, at the stage door, of Caroline’s great, light eyes. Affirming, affirming—oh, what was he to do? They couldn’t even put him in the decent hotel! Caroline was walking down the street. She wore a dainty little dress. The sun was on her hair, but black shadows swung overhead, and battling armies clanged behind her in the dust. Men and women lay on the sidewalk, their torn clothing exposing sticky lesions. One of them shifted painfully and held out a disintegrating paper cup. Caroline paused, opened her purse, and took out a quarter.

“Are you all right?” someone asked. Shapiro blinked, and saw the boy, the son of the woman who was having the reception. “You must be famished.” He regarded Shapiro with the merry, complicitous look of a young person who anticipates approval. “What a workout for you, I think, that piece of G.-G.’s. But we’ll have plenty of food back at home—the cooks have been racing around all day. Oh! Well, look at this. He’s smart. He brought his own.” The boy directed an amused glance toward Beale, who was ambling toward them, disemboweling an orange.

“Hello,” Shapiro said. The boy’s tone—despicable. He hoped Beale hadn’t caught it.

“Would you care for any?” Beale said. “I’m afraid it’s somewhat…” He nodded to the boy, who nodded distantly back. “You know,” he said to Shapiro, “I’m sorry if I lost my bottle a bit last night. I tend to go on, from time to time, about one thing and another. Hope I said nothing to offend.”

“Not at all,” Shapiro said. It made no difference at all.

“Good good.” A pink and rumpled smile wandered across Beale’s face. “Goody goody.”

Beale was making a complete mess of his orange. A small piece of peel had lodged in his webby tie. The boy was looking at it. “Oh,” Beale said, glancing up. “Sorry. Difficult to handle. You know, it’s strange about oranges, isn’t it? They’re so alluring. Irresistible, really. I mean, that color, for example—orange. And the glossiness. And that delicious smell they have. But it’s all very strange. I mean, what good does it do them? They can’t enjoy it. At least, so one supposes. All their deliciousness, do they get any fun out of it? No. It only gets them eaten. Isn’t that strange? I mean, what is it for, from their point of view? I suppose you might ask the same of a flower. Flowers have sort of got it all, don’t they. Looks, scent… But they have absolutely no way to appreciate that!” He giggled. “For all we know, they think of themselves as grotesque.”

The boy was considering Beale with a dreamy, meditative look. His stare idled among the stains on Beale’s suit. “Excuse me,” he said. He smiled briefly at Shapiro. “I should go find some of our”—he glanced at Beale—“guests.”

Beale gasped. “Did you hear that?” he said. “Little swine. Vicious little prick. As if I were going to crash the party! As if anyone could crash their fucking miserable party—they’ll have half the fucking army at the gate.”

“Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Shapiro,” someone was calling.

“It’s Joan,” Shapiro said, hesitating. He heard his name again. “Just a moment!” he called out. “Just a moment,” he said to Beale. “I’ve got to—”

“Little putrid viper,” Beale was saying, as Shapiro hurried off.

“We’re ready to leave now,” Joan said cheerily as Shapiro approached. “Everyone’s gone down to the parking lot.”

“Just a moment,” he said. “I’ll be right—”

“Don’t be long,” she sang with warning gaiety, and tweaked the lapel of his tuxedo.

“I’ll be right—” he said. A tuxedo! He might just as well be wearing grease-stained overalls with his name embroidered on the pocket. “One more minute.” He hurried back to find Beale, but Beale had disappeared.

“Hello?” Shapiro said. “Hello? I just wanted to—” But where could Beale have gone to? How arrogant that young boy was! How—Well, and the fact was, Shapiro thought, a man in livery could hardly afford to turn up his nose at a sloppy suit. “Hello?” he said again.

For a moment there was just a gentle surf of night noises, but then Shapiro made out Beale’s voice, faint, very faint. Following the sound, he saw Beale, a dark shape, crouched in the corner of a concrete trough that must have been intended as some sort of reflecting pool.

Beale was speaking into his tape recorder. His voice had a stealthy, incantatory tone. “And now…” But the little noises of the night were washing away his words. “…take you to the party I promised you. It’s… prominent family here.”

There was an oily stain, or fissure, Shapiro saw, at the bottom of the trough. “And any important artist from… And what a beautiful… high, white… and tasteful objets d’art. But tonight… to take you out into the…”

Shapiro stood as still as he could and strained to hear.

“How lovely it…” Beale crooned into the machine. “Fountains, flowers… And… of chirpings! Croakings! Can you hear, my darling?”

Beale held the tape recorder up in the lifeless trough. Shapiro shuddered—a slight chill was coming down from the mountains.

“And those other sounds—do you hear?” Beale said. His voice was growing louder or Shapiro’s ears were adjusting, seeking out the words. “The little plashings?” Beale said. “The fountain, yes, but what else? Not Spanish. But a language, yes! Just so. A language that’s much, much older.

“Yes, because we’re right across from the servants’ quarters. And right there, on the servants’ portico, the children are playing. The Indian children. Their mothers are all inside, serving little goodies to the guests. Can you hear the chatter behind us, of the guests?” Shapiro closed his eyes. Yes, he could hear it, the chatter, the pointless chatter. And smell the orange-scented garden. Yes—and he could see the children, just beyond the fountain, with their black, black hair, and shrewd, ravishing little faces.

“Good,” Beale said. “Yes. And one of the children has a piece of stone or crockery. The others whisper together. They’re joining hands—they seem to be inventing a game, don’t they? Or reinventing. Some sort of game. Maybe they remember…”

Shapiro’s name floated up from the parking lot. They were beginning to shout for him. Yes, yes, he thought fiercely, and held up a hand as though both to forestall and to shush them. In a moment… He sat down, as quietly as he could manage, on the cool concrete. Another moment and he’d go.

“When I first came to this country,” Beale was telling the tape recorder, “the sky was a blue dome over the highlands. People had more food then, and weren’t so afraid. When you went hiking through the villages, suddenly there would be a waterfall, and fifty, a hundred, two hundred women, swaying along the mountain, coming to do their washing.”

Ah! Along the mountain, coming closer. Their faces were in shadow still, and indistinct. But any minute, any minute now…

“I wanted to speak to them,” Beale said. “But how could I? I was only an apparition! But—are you listening, my darling? I know they’re still there—they’ll always be there, beyond the curtain of blood.” Beale stretched himself out in the trough, tucking the tape recorder under his head like a pillow, and a delicious sensation of rest poured into Shapiro’s body. “I’m tired now.” Beale patted the tape recorder. “I think I’ll sleep. But it’s going to be all right. Because the first thing. In the morning. When the sun is up again and shining? I’ll start back off to them. And finally we’ll speak. Please be there with me. They’ll be so happy. I know they will. Because everyone has something, some little thing, my darling, they’ve been waiting so long to tell you…”