WHEN THE FLOWERS Mr. Valdez had ordered were loaded in the van, Caterina was still lying in bed. She lay as she had before, on a pile of pillows, one leg pulled up and bent at the knee as if in the shape of a number 4, like a ballerina frozen in mid-pirouette. She was asleep. She lay with one hand spread open on a big yellow notebook, exactly like the big yellow notebook Mr. Valdez had used except that his was empty and hers was crammed with words.

Caterina was sleeping because she had been writing almost until dawn. Every night she wrote until she fell asleep and, if she woke up in the night, her face pressed against the wire spine of her notebook, she would start again.

She loved stories. From the time she was too small to know what a word was, she would lie in the crook of her father’s arm and look up into his face with eyes like a surprised kitten, watching his mouth, following the movement of his lips and the miracle of the noises that came from them. And then, when she was only a little older, the words took on a meaning and exploded inside her head, like fiesta fireworks against the black velvet sky, shooting pictures across her brain.

When he came in from the fields, stooped and exhausted, she would run to him and hold his hand although it was covered with mud and walk with him into the house and wait quietly until he had eaten his soup before she asked for another story.

She loved stories. She saw them everywhere. She took the stories they told her in church and spun them out, adding more events, more happenings, extra characters. Mama told her that was a blasphemy and she must not do it, but she walked home from church with Pappi and he laughed and asked for more. She read stories in the faces of the people in the village. She made it her business to imagine happy stories for the people who were sad and misfortunes for the people who were cruel.

At school she discovered that numbers had stories to tell as much as words. Number 6 and Number 4 were lovers who longed to make ten, like 7 and 3, like 8 and 2 but 9 and 7 disliked each other.

She remembered the day she had learned about pi, a magical, secret number that nobody knew, that just went on and on forever, never changing, just rolling out, not repeating but wandering on down smaller and smaller paths without any end. And Fibonacci: 1 plus 2 makes 3, 2 plus 3 makes 5, 3 plus 5 makes 8, up and up and up, great towers of number, every third one an even number, every sixth one a multiple of the sixth, every eighth one a multiple of the eighth, every seventh one a multiple of the seventh and every single one of them in a perfect ratio: each one of them 1.6 times larger than the one before. She remembered the day Señora Arnaz had told them that and then solemnly marched every child to the front of the class to prove that the distance from the floor to their belly buttons, and the distance from the floor to the top of their heads was a perfect, beautiful, magic, mystic, sacramental Fibonacci number.

And then, one day when she was still quite a little girl, Pappi did not come home from the field. It grew dark. Mama lit the lamp and he still did not come home so they put on their coats and went out looking. He was in the field when they found him, lying on his face as if he had suddenly fallen asleep because he was just too tired to keep working for even one more day. His hand was clawed into the ground and, when they picked him up to take him home, a lump of earth from the field came home with him, gripped tight in his fist so the shape of his fingers and the lines of his palm were squashed into it.

Caterina made up a story about that. She wondered if he scrabbled at the dirt in pain or if he held the earth in his hand because it was his and he loved it and there was nobody else to love and be there with him when he died. She did not tell anybody else about that story. The lump of earth from his hand dried out, cracked and whispered away to dust. She brushed it outside and she did not bother with stories any more. She stuck to numbers and the numbers brought her to university and at university she was so lonely and so afraid that she began to tell herself stories again. She wrote.

When the flowers Mr. Valdez had ordered at last arrived at Caterina’s flat it was lunchtime. She was up and out of bed but she was not dressed and she hurried to the door, wrapping a chenille robe around herself as she went. It did not fit. It was indecently short and, in spite of the belt, Caterina instinctively held it shut with one hand gripping the lapels. A moment or two earlier she had been naked, the way the cat in the yard was naked, the way the pigeons on the window ledge were naked, natural and innocent. Now, wrapped in a worn pink dressing gown with coffee stains down the front, with everything hidden that the artists and the pornographers would want on show, now she suddenly crackled with heat.

There was another knock. “I’m coming. I’m coming,” she said but, when she got to the door and turned the key in the lock, there was nobody there.

A voice from the stairs said: “There’s more on the way,” and Caterina saw at her feet three buckets of blooms crowding the doorstep.

For a moment she was too astonished to say anything, and when she said: “Hang on!” the door to the street had already banged shut.

She knew it was a mistake. Nobody would send her flowers. Certainly nobody would send so many flowers.

She ran back into the flat and, in the time it took to pull on a T-shirt and jump into a pair of jeans, the delivery man had returned.

He was red in the face and wheezing after climbing the stairs with his arms full of buckets. Buckets are heavy. But he was still a man, like Costa and De Silva, like L.H. Valdez and Father Gonzalez, and he couldn’t help but look at Caterina. That T-shirt. It stretched across her, skimmed her and then fell away like a waterfall, like a river dropping off a cliff, held out from her body in a loose flapping circle that left her belly exposed. Of course he looked. He was a man.

“You’ll have to take some of these inside, love. I can’t get in the door.”

“No. Wait. There’s been a mistake. They’re not for me.”

The man squinted down into the pocket of his shirt. He took out a packet of cigarettes with its top ripped off and then a small, white envelope which he handed to her.

“That you?”

Caterina was astonished. It showed in her face.

“No mistake then. There’s more, so if you could just get them out of the door, that’d be a help.”

He went off down the stairs again and, when he stopped on the first landing, looked back and said: “Jesus.” She mistook it for exasperation. Three years later, when things were tight before payday and the florist sacked him after just a little bit of money went missing from the till although he was going to pay it back for sure, when he went off in the van and drove to Punto Del Rey just to gather his thoughts and the cops found him there and he got two months in the city jail, he told his cellmates about the day he met Caterina. Nobody believed him.

Caterina had a way of looking—not that she knew she was doing it—a kind of angry scowl she wore whenever she met a man. It was a protective thing, attack being the best form of defense. It was as if she went about always with her little hands knotted into fists, ready for a fight, and it showed in her face in a look that said: “What do you think you’re looking at?” She knew very well what they were looking at.

But, standing there in the doorway, holding that little envelope with buckets of flowers all around her and puddles of water between her toes, the scowl vanished. She looked at the envelope and she knew who had sent it. She recognized that broad nib, the dark ink. Caterina put her little finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. Inside there was nothing, or nearly nothing. Just a plain, white card and “Chano.” Just one word. Not even “I write.” Less than that. One word less and one letter less. No “love from.” Just a name. His name. She was delighted. He had not pledged his love lightly and even that she regarded as a blessing. It meant he might.

Across the landing the door opened and Erica came out. “Thank God you’re all right,” she said.

“I’m fine. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Haven’t you heard about the bomb? It’s all over the radio. Somebody planted a bomb at the university. I thought you were going in early. I was worried.”

And then she saw the flowers.

“Who sent all these?”

“Who do you think?” Caterina waggled the envelope teasingly by one corner and fanned herself as if to stave off a swoon.

“No!”

“Yes!”

Erica snatched the card away. Caterina let her. “Chano! Ooooh, Chano.”

“That’s ‘Mr. L.H. Valdez’ to you.”

“Did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Come on! Have you done it?”

“No.”

“He’ll want to. For all these flowers he’ll expect it.”

“There’s more.”

The delivery man was coming, clanking up from the street with four more buckets, and they leaned out over the stairs to watch him. Three years later, in the town jail, he told them about that too and they didn’t believe him.

“My God. He’ll definitely want to do it now.”

Caterina laughed and said: “I’d let him.”

Standing there at the top of the stairs the delivery man heard her and he didn’t say anything but he thought plenty. He put down the last of his buckets with a gasp, lit a celebratory cigarette and he said: “You can keep the buckets, they’re paid for,” but he thought: “Yeah, I bet you would, but not for me you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t let me.”

He stood waiting for an awkward moment until he realized they had not even thought to tip him, picked a stray bit of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and staggered back down the stairs. A pale blue trail of smoke rose angrily behind him and grew thinner and angrier until there was nothing left but the smell. That night, when he went home, the wife who had loved him for more than twenty years cooked him steak and took a bath and dried herself and dusted herself in a blizzard of powder and took the ground glass stopper from a bottle of Christmas perfume, as small, as precious as a reliquary, and dabbed herself in secret places and came to bed and loved him. But he didn’t tell them that three years later in the town jail. He didn’t even remember. All he remembered was meeting Caterina, and nobody believed him.

“Help me with these,” Caterina said and picked up some buckets. “You’ll have to take some. There’s far too many for the flat.”

Poor Caterina, she opened that little white envelope and she had no idea that it contained her death warrant. She had read his name without a shudder, not as the name of her executioner but like the name of a lover, as if a man who sent her flowers must be always one and never the other. But, sometimes, that’s how life is. Sometimes a tiny dab of glue, moistened on the edge of an envelope, is the only thing that holds together the whole world and everything that’s in it. Sometimes life, death, disaster arrive with no more warning than the whispered crunch of a snail shell underfoot. No one notices but the snail.