WITH DR. COCHRANE asleep in his chair, Caterina got up to go. She took the coffee cup from his fingers and left it, sticky with brandy, on the shelf by the window. She looked down into the street. She had no idea where she was, no idea how to reach home, but she knew she had to find Chano and kiss him and make things right.

She shut the door quietly and went down the darkened stairs and out into the street. The policemen had already gone. They had seen enough.

Caterina stood at the edge of the pavement, deciding which way to go and she chose “downhill.” It was the way she had come and it was what her father had taught her to do. If she got lost in the mountains, Pappi told her, go down. The rain goes down and the rain would turn into a stream and the stream to a river and where there were rivers there were always people and they would bring her back to him.

People were easier to find in the city. In the city they grew as thick as weeds, they filled the houses and clogged the streets, they swarmed like ants but they lived lonely lives—far lonelier than the most solitary mountain shepherd. He might walk into town once a month to get drunk or buy a pair of trousers but people would know his name. His neighbors would know all about him though he lived two valleys away and if, one fiesta day, he failed to appear they would come looking.

But not here. Not in the city. Here men slept out in alleys wrapped in stinking blankets, old people stood stooped in the streets with their hands out and nobody said: “Mama, here is bread,” or “Come in and share this bit of soup with us.” They walked past. They drove past and nobody saw a thing and she was becoming like them. After two years in the city she knew her way from her flat to the university, she knew Erica and she loved Chano, but there was no one else and now she was lost.

Caterina walked down the hill to the junction and turned right but it brought her closer to the highway. She could hear the roar of it hidden behind the houses like a waterfall lost in trees. The cars scorched the sky with their lights as they passed and the lamps along the roadside towered on their concrete stalks in an endless scream of light. Caterina turned back. She wanted a river but this one was too big to cross, too fast-flowing. She went back up the hill and walked through endless side streets, looking long into the night at every junction until she spotted the bright jungle of shop signs because there, she knew, there would be a bus stop and although she was lost the bus driver would know the way.

The timetable screwed to the lamppost was nothing more than a hopeful lie, and when the bus arrived at last it couldn’t take her back to Cristobal Avenue. She had to change. It took a long time to get across the city but that didn’t matter. It gave her time to think of the things she wanted to do for Chano, the special gifts she would bring him, the things—apart from herself—that she would lay at his feet, the ways she would reach out to him and reassure him, remake him and rebuild him, the things she would do to show him that he was loved. He could be saved—damaged goods or not. What did that matter? Damaged goods? Everybody was damaged goods. Dr. Cochrane had made her admit that, even if he could not see it in himself. Chano could be saved and Caterina knew she was the one who could do it. She was right, of course. Caterina could have saved him—if he had wanted to be saved.

A long time ago the priest in that little mountain church told a story about a nasty old woman who was sent to Hell and left to starve. She wept and she prayed until, at last, God took pity and sent down a moldy carrot on a string, and the nasty old woman grabbed the carrot and held on to it as God hauled her up out of the pit. When they saw her rising, all the other poor souls down there tried to cling on but, instead of helping them, the nasty old woman struggled and kicked and fought until the string broke and they all fell back down, taking the carrot with them. Caterina had forgotten that story and she would have done well to remember it.

The bus stopped with a shudder and she got down. Even at that hour Cristobal Avenue was choked with traffic. She had to go to the next corner to cross, hurrying through a break in the traffic and walking back down the avenue to the brown little side street where she lived.

Caterina walked quietly—as quietly as the grown-up shoes she had worn to buy her engagement ring would allow—toward the flat, a little fearful of the shadows, her feet sliding on the dusty, dirty, crunching stairs. She turned the key silently in the lock, careful not to wake Erica—who, anyway was not there—moving quickly through the darkened flat to her bedside, where she picked up a fat folder and left again, back out to the night and the streets, which were frightening, and to Chano, which was far, far worse than she knew.