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“Why didn’t this neighborhood do what Claudia’s did with her mother’s boyfriend?” I asked. “Run him out?”

Jorge looked at his hands and I could hear humiliation in his voice. “He’s in a gang, Margaret. He’d probably shoot us. Or somebody else would.”

I now understood more why Rita couldn’t talk with the family. So I played the big bad gringa. I gave Christina’s mother a dark warning of unspecified impending doom if anything happened to Christina. Then, by spreading rumors, I let it be known in the neighborhood that I had contacts with the military police (a lie) and that I could get her children taken away, even get her sent to prison. I could only hope she believed this enough to get her boyfriend to stop.

“Her mother wants to destroy her,” Rita had said to me later that day when I’d met her at our coffee cafe near the center of town. “Because she’s so pretty. She’s competition. And also because Christina’s so smart. Christina now has more education and possibilities for her future than her mother ever had.” Rita waved to Reinaldo. “Two medium coffees, Reinaldo. With milk. And could you get us some water, too?”

Reinaldo nodded to me. “Why, hello again. My God, you two don’t look happy. Again.”

“Yeah,” Rita said. “Just get us the coffees.”

“Rita, do you think this would have happened to Christina if she hadn’t been in Bahia Street?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Margaret. It’s a question, isn’t it? But, yes, probably. This kind of thing is disturbingly common. When people get too poor in the cities like this, when they see other people with so much while they’re starving… I don’t know, Margaret. Our city is falling apart.”

Reinaldo brought our coffees. “Here,” he said. “I brought you some cake too. It’s on the house. Looks to me like you need it.”

“Oh, Reinaldo, you’re so thoughtful.”

Reinaldo pretended to wipe the counter in front of us and then left.

“Recently, when Christina comes to Bahia Street, she’s had bruises on her. I think her mother’s begun beating her when she realized we’d found out what was going on.”

“Rita, isn’t there any way we could just take Christina away from them? I don’t know. But isn’t there something we could do?”

“No.” Rita poked at her cake. “And anyway, Christina would do anything to please her mother.” She looked at me. “Margaret, more than anything in the world, Christina wants her mother to love her.” We ate our cake in silence. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate the cake to please Reinaldo.

“And, Margaret,” Rita said as we left the coffee shop, “don’t go back to that neighborhood for awhile, OK?”

A month later, I was back on the train heading to my job in Portland. Such beautiful countryside but all I kept seeing was Christina. The run I always used for my commute didn’t serve lunch, so the dining room was empty. I had developed the habit of making the empty dining car my moving office. It had a large table, a small lamp, and I had four hours of uninterrupted work time.

I had to read forty essays before class that night. I spent three days a week at the university; I spent two, and weekends, with Bahia Street. And I was doing a rotten job at both. These were some of the best students I’d had. They were well-read, curious, analytical. I raced to class, hastily prepared, sticking only to strict office hours and then leaving, spending no extra time with either students or faculty. As for research or publishing—I couldn’t even think about it. The best I was doing was giving papers now and again.

Bahia Street was like a fragile flame continually threatened by a wind gust. How could I expect others to devote time when I hardly could?

I had lunch with my friend Robert the next day between classes. Robert was about ten years older than me and a therapist. He had also devoted his life to Vipassina Buddhist meditation. In the late 1980s he had begun to teach. Some years ago, during a Christmas visit home, my sister had dragged me to a week-long silent meditation retreat. All week I was annoyed, frustrated, chafed