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By Root 346 0

my parents, about distributing my failure as a son between them. And because this lie about my father was comically absurd, because he was the man of all the men I knew most free from any will–to–domination, it felt more like a harmless joke than a morbid tempting of fate or karmic gambling with parental health. I also felt that, in order to avoid any future confusion, I needed to get my stories straight, and so decided to replay the confession I had made to Isabel and Rufina to Teresa, who would then tell Arturo and Rafa, all of whom believed I had, when we first met, recently suffered one of life’s profoundest losses. Surely some part of the mystery I liked to think I held for Teresa derived from the fact that, after my dramatic performance at the party, I made no subsequent reference to my suffering, although suffering could be read into my silences. That I was thousands of miles away from the rest of my family so soon after such a tragedy, although I never specified the timeframe, prepared the ground for my lie about my impossible father, and my new claim that I might not return to the U.S. after the completion of my fellowship furthered my image as exile. At any rate, when the rains and early dark began to give way to warmer, longer days and milder nights, and the accordion player was back in La Plaza Santa Ana and the streets were again alive, I began to see more of Teresa, who did not seem to have a job, although in theory she was employed at the gallery. I would walk to Salamanca after “working” in El Retiro and Teresa would leave the gallery in someone else’s hands and accompany me to movies, bookstores, cafés.

Whenever I was with Teresa, whenever we were talking, I felt our faces engaged in a more substantial and sophisticated conversation than our voices. Her face was formidable; it seemed by turns very young and very old; when she opened her eyes wide, she looked like a child, and when she squinted in concentration, the tiny wrinkles at their outer corners made her seem worldly, wise. Because she could instantly look younger or older, more innocent or experienced than she was, she could parry whatever speech was addressed to her. If you were to accuse her, say, of reading too much into a particular scene in a movie, she would widen her eyes and look at you with an innocence that made you feel guilty of projection; if you accused her of some form of naiveté, her squint would bespeak such expanses of experience that the accusation was instantly turned back upon you. Her eyes could deflect or reflect or ironize, and then her smile, which was wide, would instantly restore a tabula rasa, benevolently forgiving any claim against her.

I believed the dialectical movement of her face, however, was challenged by our particular circumstance; I never spoke English with Teresa, not since the first night of our meeting when my volubility had swelled. I told her that this was to promote my acquisition of Spanish, but it was, in fact, to preserve the possibility of misspeaking or being misunderstood, and to secure and amplify the mystery of that inaugural outburst. I believed my rant on the way to Rafa’s party had impressed her, and I was determined not to ruin it with banalities. With my performance in the car her sole sample of my English, I hoped she would always translate my fragmented Spanish in her head, transforming my halting and semicoherent utterances into the most eloquent English she could imagine. She would not, like Isabel, merely intuit depths, but would actually sound them in her painstakingly mastered second language. Of course she would never arrive at a satisfactory English formulation of whatever my Spanish negatively figured, but this would further preserve the mystique of my powers in my mother tongue. Such conversations would be the counterpoint to her ongoing work with Arturo of translating my poems, work she had almost entirely taken over; there she tried to imagine every possible Spanish correlative to my English, such as it was; here, she tried to extract from my remedial Spanish the poet’s native