Ruídos

"Nunca he tenido miedo," Aldóvar said, his voice curling with his cigarette smoke, crawling over the mouth of the dusty alto saxophone beside him, disappearing into the air. He felt the strange woman's eyes on him, teeming with pity. Ignoring her, he tapped at his cigarette with dirt-crescented nails. I have never been afraid. I have never had fear.

Aldóvar had been sitting this way, in this corner of the dining room, in this specific marinade of beer and smoke and sad wisdom for ten days straight, since the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday. That morning he awoke to find that Patrick had gone to work, had taken the car, and had left him with nothing more than a birthday note in which he promised at once to be back soon and to stay gone forever. Since then, Aldóvar had risen only thirteen times—once daily to use the bathroom, once on Thursday for the box in the living room where the marijuana was kept, once on Saturday to bring his old saxophone from the studio so that it could sit beside him in his corner and remind him of his pain. Only today had he gone outside—first to the deli on 73rd and York for a pack of Camels and some rolling papers, then to the East River where he walked slow and talked to the pigeons until he found what he was looking for, sitting on a bench in old sneakers and a red skirt.

Now back home with the woman, he looked at the note again. The dirt from his fingers made half-moons on the edge of the paper. The letters hung like a row of prison bars gone limp and jangly. They staggered right to left, struggling to maintain their order, leaning gratefully on the paper's horizontal lines—five or six, and then, on the seventh, a break, a dash, his name—Patrick. The note had been ten notes, a new note every time Aldóvar brought it to his face to squint at it under the chandelier light. Ten days ago, it was a note about his birthday, a happy one, which Patrick would help him celebrate when he returned from the school, Aldóvar had imainged, with a bottle of wine and a butterscotch cake.

But the note had said many things since then, things about his mother, his people, the rusted copper of his skin. Things about his thinning body and his habits, his home in Chile, and this newer home on the Upper East Side. By today, the tenth day, the note told him to mill about, to go out and to come back in, to think and speak and cry to someone else. All this in the seventh line, in the long indent, in the name's successful struggle to remain straight, and in the short, impatient dash where love should have been.

"Eso no puede ser, mi alma." Pots rattled from the kitchen and a light came on. This can't be, my soul. Fear is not an optional thing in life. In memory, maybe.

Aldóvar started up from his corner, intending to gallop into the kitchen and tell this woman something about life and memory and the respect of the two.

"No me digas nada de la vida. No me conoces." Don't tell me anything about my life! You don't know me. But he burned himself with the cigarette he'd forgotten was in his hand, and rolled back into his corner, whimpering and cursing.

"Te quemaste, ¿eh, ancianito?" She chuckled from the doorway. You burned yourself, huh, old man? Little ancient man. The woman's bare thighs rubbed together under her skirt as she rode the narrow hallway past the studio, past the bedroom, past Patrick's office, her long black plastic braids hanging like a tarp over her back. The old wood floors creaked under her weight. She paused before each room, peeked in quickly as though examining a dress on a rack, and moved on down the hallway until she found the bathroom. She emerged...