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By Root 328 0

alley that was home to a few unfortunates, including him. He told her that all America had given him was the alley where he slept at night and a red and blue sleeping bag with a star over his heart when he lay on his back rather than on his side, as was his custom. The alley, the sleeping bag, the star, and a birth certificate: William Locke, born June 27, 1959, in Montgomery. From Alabama he had trekked up to New York on foot. He coughed, but he was proud and happy because his portraits of Olia’s feet were good, and this made his small, shrivelled body quiver with emotion. There was fire in his eyes. Not the sort that warms the insides but the violent kind that burns and consumes a person. Willy was consuming himself. He wanted to give her the pictures but she refused. She tried to convince him they were good enough to draw a connoisseur’s attention, and who knows? But he coughed even harder and wanted to sit down on the curb and catch his breath.

He ended up lying on his side, with both hands pressed against his heart. In a final effort, his left hand slid down to his jacket pocket, pulled out the negatives of his latest work, and held them out to her. She looked around for help, spotted a phone booth at the far end of the block, and ran over to call 911. When she came back, he greeted her:

“Delighted to have made your acquaintance, beautiful. You have superb feet. Looks like you were lucky enough to have met the greatest artist on 125th Street before he left to join the gods. Looks like his time has come. You know, I hope that in Hell they stop going up from the South to the North to find salvation. I hope that, down there, we can finally come to rest . . . It’s still a great mystery. The title I gave your portraits is ‘Olia and Her Feet’ . . . Olia in . . . my . . . Goodbye, Olia.”

“Goodbye, Willy.”

She was disconsolate. The firemen arrived twenty minutes later. Willy had died speaking of “Olia and Her Feet.” When she returned to Sofia, she developed her friend’s last pictures. The luminous shadows of the negatives proved to be a poignant study of the vast metropolis’s hurried steps. Walkers. An exploration of how far the steps could go, of how many times they could be multiplied.

Feet can get tired too. But is that visible in photographs? When they are printed, can one step be told apart from the next? The step that is coming from the one going away? The step that knows where here is from the one that does not?

19

ASKIA WAS moved by Willy’s story. And, as sometimes occurred in such cases, he spent a troubled night dreaming of Sidi. He found himself in the countryside. Sidi was taking him to the bank of a creek that cut through a wood. He liked Sidi’s smell, a mixture of incense and cowpats. It came from his grimy hair, the haircut that lent him the appearance of a Rastafarian in some Kingston ghetto. He was not wearing his turban. They sat down on the grassy bank, and Sidi spoke to him, proud to open the book of his speech. He told him a strange story, the story of Juan Preciado, a young man searching for someone who was absent, his father, in the ruins and shadows of a village named Comala.

The young man in Sidi’s book wandered the roads, questioning living beings who turned out to be anguished ghosts, fleeting forms with peculiar names: Pedro Paramo-Ulysses, Doloritas-Eurydice, Susana-Electra. These names meant nothing to the child he was in the dream. Yet he liked the aura of strangeness that enveloped them, the mystery that they inhabited, and Sidi remarked that the ghosts came from a great mythology: their names, their destinies, the location of the villages, the roads they haunted. They were men and women on the move.

Most of the story escaped him, but he urged Sidi to go on with it. He needed to know if the young man from Comala finally discovered signs of the absent one’s passage. He thought the phantoms might have informed the young man. But Sidi cut him off: “End of story. I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow. Just keep in mind that Juan Preciado is still searching for the absent one, Pedro Paramo,