The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [41]
They cross over to the traffic circle around the giant statue of Manuel Noriega. His broad, pockmarked face, angled down at the orbiting taxicabs, retains a look of stony impregnability, but emerging from the side of one eye the sculptor has chosen to affix a large, utterly incongruous silver teardrop, which gleams in the streetlight against the bronze. On the gray slate of the plaza surrounding the plaque, fellow revelers in the municipally sponsored irony have spray-painted accompanying slogans:
FREE NORIEGA!
MANUEL IS OUR MAN!
NORIEGA FOR STATE COMPTROLLER!
She sits down, happy and exhausted, on the plaza floor, against the statue’s pediment. Javier collapses next to her, and silently they watch the cabs spin by, bejeweled with cigarette ads on light-board displays, the drivers and passengers mere shadows underneath. A strong wind begins blowing from the south, and Ursula turns in the wind’s direction to catch the coolness on her face. Down the mountain slope, between the misshapen, toroidal dunce caps of the Volcanoville tenements, the Lady of Nazareth icon glows blue atop the hospital, her face an empty circle, her sleeves draping from arms held slightly out from her sides in an open-palmed gesture of welcoming, which, upon continued viewing, always seems to transform into a kind of apologetic shrug.
Sorry, she appears to say. No insurance, no service.
Nothing we can do.
Our hands are tied.
Talk to your congressman.
Ursula laughs to herself and in the sting of the wind feels a wetness on her cheek. With her hand she confirms a couple of windblown tears. She runs her finger under the bottom of her eye and feels more wetness pooling. She blinks a few times. The false tears blur her vision a bit, spreading the yellow lights from a nearby liquor-store sign over the bottom of the sky, spreading the green and red traffic lights over the blacktop, doing magic tricks with the wind, making of it confetti, whirling ashes, a star garden, a flamingo waltz. And for one perfect moment, she sees the city as the savage girl must see it, as Ivy must see it, as Javier must see it: every nub of masonry and huddled shadow and dopplering rhythm ready to burst open like a jack-in-the-box with some new message, every alley and lot and building ready to serve as a mystical testing ground for the human spirit, every square inch of concrete and tar replete with a meaning after all, and it’s not ugly, no, not really, it’s actually quite beautiful, this ugly, ugly place, and then her throat becomes thick, and she is sobbing.
Javier looks at her searchingly.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice catching painfully in her throat.
Javier says nothing as she struggles to pull herself together, his eyes luminous, sympathetic.
She takes a few breaths, wipes her face on her sleeve.
“I’ve always wanted . . . ,” she begins, “I’ve always longed to see the world the way I think you see it, Javier. Like it’s something more than it is. But I just can’t. I can’t do it. Not for more than a minute. And then it’s gone again.”
He nods. “I know how that feels,” he says.
She smiles miserably. “Chas says you have some kind of mood disorder, but as far as I can tell, I’m the one with the disorder.”
Her words seem to fluster him. After a moment he seems ready to speak but she cuts him off.
“All I mean to say is I don’t want to bring you down. It’s nice of you to be so nice to me but I’ll just bring you down, Javier. I bring everybody down. So really, thanks for everything you’ve done but—”
He reaches over and takes her hand lightly in his, and her thoughts scatter. After a moment the warmth of his hand seeps into hers, and she watches, mesmerized, as their hands become the whole world. His slender fingers